Reviews for Ground Floor Theatre Performances
Review: Emiliana: A Revolution Cabaret by Ground Floor Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 03, 2026
Jessica Peña Torres is exuberant and sexy as Sylvia masquerading as Emiliana, the cabaret singer. There's more than one revolución in her vision. Viva!
Emiliana - A Revolution Cabaret shouldn't have had three weekends of performances at Austin's Ground Floor Theatre. Jessica Peña Torres and her gang should have had more. In fact, I could imagine them at the center of a long-running band of gleeful Latino/a artists, establishing a "Revolution Cabaret" brand as powerful as that of Esther's Follies. Oh well. Maybe not just yet. But I spent a delicious evening with them at the Ground Floor Theater …
Review: PARADE by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown, Ground Floor Theatre, Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 12, 2025
Rarely has Ausin seen a production as complex, powerful, accomplished and harrowing as PARADE at the Ground Floor Theatre. A must-see (or must-stream).
The disturbing themes of Alfred Uhry's Parade are intensified by Jason Robert Brown's score and by production values unsurpassed by Central Texas theatres of comparable size. This isn't musical theatre as we're used to it; it's a dark, dark story founded in actual events, one that presents characters full of nuance and ambiguity and offers no easy resolutions. Events begin with the murder of an innocent, a killing that is never resolved or even closely …
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Review: Amy and the Orphans by Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 02, 2025
Class differences, conflicts, wrong decisions; three very different and differently abled siblings, continental distances apart both geographically and metaphorically.
Amy and the Orphans is a depressing play. By intent. The dissolution of families, the bankruptcy of values, and an interesting watch glass study of adult failure to thrive—yet playwright Lindsey Ferrentino wraps a veneer of comedy around her serious themes. You in the audience are supposed to laugh, but you aren’t allowed to be happy. Oddly, that’s a good thing. Ground Floor Theatre stages Amy and the Orphans in its excellent facility with its …
Review: JACK AND AIDEN by Lane Michael Stanley and Tova Katz, Ground Floor Theatre, November 30 - December 16, 2023
by David Glen Robinson
Published on December 03, 2023
A bold, almost brutal portrait of the gay urban village, JACK AND AIDEN is stark and powerful. Stanley's vivid language, Katz's music, and Turner's direction hurl these two actors into unresolved life crises.
Ground Floor Theatre in east Austin has just presented the world premiere of an important musical. A collaboration of Lane Michael Stanley (book) and Tova Katz (music and lyrics), Jack and Aiden explores the lives of two gays, one cis, one trans, caught up in the life of hook-ups and cyber technology, where hooking up is easy and falling apart is easier. The couple’s emotions and desires draw them closer into a relationship; and that’s …
Review: Jack and Aiden by Lane Michael Stanley -- Workshop Reading at Austin's Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 02, 2023
Playwright Stanley portrays the closed society of the gay urban village in language that's authentic and often course. GFT stages a full production in December, 2023.
Jack and Aiden has a cast of two attractive actors giving a positive, almost ethnographic depiction of twenty-first century urban gay life. They quickly drill down past the gay ghetto to the sub-sub-culture of hook-up practitioners who practically exist in their cyber technology and the on-line world. Please forgive the brief sociology essay: the place is the urban gay village--post-Stonewall, post-AIDS, post-Covid19—where people meet anonymously through texts, transmitting emojis and avatars instead of photographs, seeking …
Review #2 of 2: Jenna & the Whale by Ground Floor Theatre
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on August 24, 2023
In widely opposed formats, JENNA AND THE WHALE and MOBY DICK agree; life is a state of perpetual ignorance that death may or may not cure.
(Warning. spoilers.) (Trigger warning: suicide.) “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.” ― Herman Melville, Moby Dick “They say, Jonah, he was swallowed by a whale, but I say there's no truth to that tale, I know Jonah, he was swallowed by a song.” ― Paul Simon, Jonah The whale is the traditional …