Reviews for Last Act Theater Company Performances
Review (#2 of 2): POSTVILLE by Don Fried, Last Act Theater Company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on August 06, 2016
POSTVILLE is a very American story with a very real origin in America’s heartland. Everyone involved has given it a beautiful and brief life at the Trinity Street Theatre. Do not miss it.
Finding Heart in America’s Heartland The opening scene is quaint, peaceful and idyllic: a café on a nearly deserted main street of small town America. The locals slowly occupy the rocking chairs and tiny tables waiting both patiently and impatiently for the succor of their morning coffees. The inevitable weather conversations begin along with a re-hash of the past year’s events. Past year because it seems only a few events happen a year …
Review (#1 of 2): POSTVILLE by Don Fried, Last Act Theater Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 31, 2016
Postville emphasizes that sources of refuge and support often lie across religions, across cultures, across voting lines, across the tracks, and sometimes just in the rocking chairs along Main Street.
The latest production of Last Act Theatre Company involves life in a small town in Iowa, based on actual events in the 1990s. Named for the town, the play Postville captures many of the events, some characters, and almost all of the feelings of the time when Hasidic Jews arrived in Postville to purchase and reopen a meatpacking plant for marketing of kosher meats. The closed plant had been the only realistic source of employment …
Review: Stalking John Barrowman by Last Act Theater Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 05, 2015
This show wins with fresh wit and seemingly new melodies. The songs also render that giggly middle-school humor of presenting a few sly obscenities in song.
Stalking John Barrowman is a delightful, uproarious, sensational work of musical theatre. It has all of those qualities in abundance, plus it is loaded with that dry, obscene British wit, the kind Americans love. Think Monty Python’s Flying Circus with pussy, twat, and labia jokes. Don’t forget the twins Poo and Pee. No, stop what you’re thinking; it is all presented quite cleanly, with surprise after surprise, none of which will be revealed here. The plot …
Review: Nursery Crimes by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 17, 2014
David Boss with his resonant baritone and weary dead-pan styling makes a fine Philip Marlowe, or, in acknowledgment of the film noir inspiration for playwright Greg Klein and the company, a good Bogey. Klein's play is an homage to that very distinctive style, so much so that the first half of the Kickstarter promo video was a 1940s-style dramatization with first-person narration, video-recorded in stark black and white by director Will Hollis Snider. You could write a …
Review: Peer Gynt by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 28, 2014
Henrik Ibsen's second-floor apartment is maintained and curated today as a major tourist attraction in Oslo, the capital of Norway. This past summer we found it rather impressive; it's so centrally located that in the last years of his life the grumpy little man with sideburns and top hat could easily take his daily constitutional down to the Grand Cafe for cigars and coffee. By that time he was a Great Man, eagerly pointed out …
Review: The Sniper's Nest by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2014
The Corpus Christi friends who founded Last Act Theatre Company in mid-2011 have proven dab hands at locating 'found' theatre spaces in Austin, a history that in some ways is a counterweight to Elizabeth Cobbe's piece last week in the Austin Chronicle on vanishing theatre venues. For Lisa Soland's two-actor contrafactual depiction of Lee Harvey Oswald's role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they were even more creative. They located a windowless underground room accessible …