Reviews for Trouble Puppet Theatre Company Performances
Review: Undark - A Radioactive Puppet Play by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 13, 2022
This workshop production with gaps and taped-up aspects gives a foretaste of another deeply socially concerned work to be done by Trouble Puppet master Connor Hopkins.
Trouble Puppet Theater’s first production in a while, Undark: A Radioactive Puppet Play, remains in development. The performances at the Vortex in east Austin were supported by a Workshop Grant from the Jim Henson Foundation. That organization, the Olympus of puppetry, may give a full production grant to Undark for production in about a year’s time if its leadership ultimately likes what it sees in the workshop edition. That is the stimulus for the full …
Review: American Blood Song by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 11, 2019
Trouble Puppet performs this operetta as a linear tragic narrative, with the company's characteristic innovative unpredictability. Puppeteers wear period costumes and acceptably period hairstyles while singing their characters' roles.
“Crazy cold ‘way down there…”, the memorable line from the 60s band Blood, Sweat, and Tears seems like a prophecy of 2019’s Trouble Puppet Theater Company original production of American Blood Song, A Puppet Operetta of the Donner Party (ABS). The show is about nothing but loss, loss of country, loss of life, loss of possessions, loss of family, loss of mind, loss of self-respect, loss of morality, loss of ethics, loss of faith, loss of …
Review: The Wars of Heaven: Smackdown! by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 25, 2016
'Smackdown' is ambitious, and it takes on too many perceived evils at once. See it, by all means, and meditate upon it as you wait to see what this restless genius is going to come up with for Part III of the Wars of Heaven.
Connor Hopkins, artistic diector of Trouble Puppet Theatre Company, takes on the whole of Catholic theology and the idiocy of contemporary media. With puppets. So how can you resist? The first part of Connor's meditation, The Wars of Heaven, Part 1 in May, 2015, challenged audiences to soar in the skies and across the centuries, using John Milton's imaginative cosmology as expressed in the company's familiar bunraku style augmented by some impressive shadow puppetry. …
Review: Frankenstein by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 04, 2015
In a brilliant stage presentation full of imagery, the singular Connor Hopkins' Frankenstein is a robo-articulated concatenation of images with sinuous reptilian movement.
This is not like anybody else’s version of Frankenstein, and it is not even like Trouble Puppet’s earlier adaptations of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's literary classic. It's a full, 21st century updatingin a stylish live theatre presentation. It offers new material and extends the plot with shadow puppets and other material. Not all theatergoers find puppet theatre a full and satisfying experience. Some cannot make the mental switch away from seeing puppetry as animated …
Review 2: The Wars of Heaven, Pt. 1 by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 12, 2015
Noel Gaulin’s shadow dance as The Almighty is exquisite. He sets forth the facts of Creation and Eternity and then withdraws to His throne in the Empyrean.
The Salvage Vanguard Theater, one of east Austin’s premier warehouse theaters, lends itself to darkness. An intentional, cultivated sense of gloom prefaces Trouble Puppet Theater’s vast imaginative updating of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. For the 21st century, the work is reentitled The Wars of Heaven, Part 1. The production is ambitious in taking on this monument of world literature, but Trouble Puppet has climbed monuments before and knows how to do it. Milton’s visionary 1667 epic …
Review 1: The Wars of Heaven, Pt. 1 by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 11, 2015
Puppets and death. Puppets and injustice. People and puppets. There's a transitivity there that haunts Trouble Puppetmaster Connor Hopkins.
Puppets and death. Puppets and injustice. People and puppets. There's a transitivity there that haunts Trouble Puppetmaster Connor Hopkins, a brooding concern about a world out of kilter that informs his choice of subjects -- Frankenstein, Sinclair's The Jungle, Riddley Walker -- and his treatment of them. His original juvenile adventure story The Crapstall Street Boys takes us through a world of exploitation and cannibalism far worse than that depicted by Dickens. Now Hopkins is reaching for …