Reviews for Salvage Vanguard Theater Performances
Review: Denim Doves by Adrienne Dawes at Salvage Vanguard Theater, January 22 - February 13, 2016
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 23, 2016
The girl gang does almost the whole thing as a silly romp worthy of an unsupervised sleepover of 13-year-olds.
I can't hide it: I'm a card-carrying member of the patriarchy. More than 40 years into a marriage of depth and trust, father of a fiercely independent, talented and successful daughter. And a son. So while I agree that women got a right to have fun, I'm just not the intended audience for Adrienne Dawes' Denim Doves. She's working on a transcendent theme -- the subjugation of women both to their biology and to those, …
Review: Naked as a Gaybird by Salvage Vanguard Theater
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 07, 2015
Many of Jay Byrd's stories are tinged with tragedy or are outright tragedies; this reviewer often wondered if he should be laughing at them at all.
Jay Byrd's autobiographical one-man show Naked as a Gaybird is strong in content and themes. It's a demonstration of skill and fortitude, as any one-actor show must be. Byrd is well up to the task, with the aid of director Jenny Larson. His show is also a work of penis adoration, the visuals mostly presented in cartoon animation videos by Ray Ray Mitrano and Aron Taylor. In hilarious presentation Byrd tells about growing up gay and how …
Review: 1000 Forest Gorillas in Kansas by Salvage Vanguard Theater
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 02, 2015
They're a striking pair from the first moment they appear: Natalie George the sturdy, graceful caramel blonde and slim, quick Heloise Gold, a head shorter and a number of years more senior.
This short evening with Heloise Gold and Natalie George was an Easter egg basket of surprises. You'd hardly have expected less, given advance word that these two clever collaborators holed up in Kansas for four days with former Austinites Josh Meyer and Matt Hislope of the Rubber Repertory. Unpredictable and sometimes puzzling, the scenes that popped out of those notional Easter eggs may or may not have constituted an explicit story but they were …
Review: Thr3E Zisters, at Salvage Vanguard Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 27, 2015
The bloodless female bodies move and speak. One delivers an eerie wailing monologue insisting that the smell of cut flowers is really the flowers screaming in pain. It's an exquisitely scary moment.
Robert Matney's solo appearance for the first eight minutes or so of Three Zisters is a pure delight. Attentively silent and diffident in his vaguely Russian garb, he greets the audience with his eyes, nibbles a pickle, checks the samovar, works through an exquisite sequence of business and gestures that leaves the audience rapt, fascinated by his subtle pantomime, reminiscent of Chaplin in the silents. Once he finds his voice we learn that he's …
Review: The One-Minute Play Festival by Salvage Vanguard Theater
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 31, 2014
Seventy one-minute plays by forty-plus local playwrights presented in one evening-length work sounds very difficult to accomplish. It certainly is, but producers One Minute Play Festival and ScriptWorks pulled it off with skill at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre in Austin. Dominic D'Andrea of the NYC-based organization promotes one-minute play shows around the country. The premise is simple. Local playwrights write several one-minute plays, group them into similarly themed 'clumps,' and find actors to perform all …
Review: Bright Now Beyond by Salvage Vanguard Theater
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 06, 2014
The original musical theatre production Bright Now Beyond, created by Daniel Alexander Jones, is one of the finer efforts of the Salvage Vanguard Theatre. The successful and complex work may well serve to vault playwright Jones to higher levels of recognition in the national musical theatre community. Multi-talented theatre and performance artist Jones concentrates on the issues of sexual politics, sexuality, and identity writ large. His cross-gender persona of Jomana Jones seems to offer a career …