Reviews for Tutto Theatre Performances
Review: Zeus in Therapy by Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 23, 2013
Director Gary Jaffe and friends do the playwright full justice, and they grace us all with their version of the ancient Greek concept of mimesis, the concept that works of art are to be understood as models for beauty, truth and the good.
Tutto Theatre's Zeus in Therapy by the late UT classics professor Douglass Stott Parker is dazzling, and at times, as his brilliant wordplay coincides with the gesturing and capering of the astonishing Greek chorus, it is simply stunning. 'Stunning' is a word thrown about lightly in the casual talk of our day. But I mean it literally. The brilliance, complexity and sheer entertainment value of this staging and this cast is sufficient to blow your circuits, …
Review: The Twelfth Labor by Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 22, 2012
Stevens' script is densely conceptual, a virtual Cirque de Soleil of intellectual performance, but the story is much less complicated than his working and reworking of it.
If you arrive at the MacTheatre Black Box with happy memories of Leegrid Stevens' The Dudleys as staged last year by Tutto Theatre -- winner of eight of Austin's B. Iden Payne theatre awards -- you may well be disconcerted. The Twelfth Labor, behind its enigmatic title, is as far from the hectic world of 8-bit video games as, say, Eugene O'Neil or William Faulkner. Tutto has mounted a gorgeously moody, intellectually challenging piece, comprised of Stevens' …
Review: The Alien Baby Play by Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2012
In this production Kathleen Fletcher will make you believe in the impossible, no matter how the script was produced.
Bethany appeared first to the Austin public and to friends of Tutto Theatre in the warm and supporting setting of a private home in Westlake, last weekend. About twenty persons gathered in a living room comfortably furnished with artwork, masks and handicraft from across the world. Bethany was pleased to see all these friends at her "mom's house." She hurried about, offered us cookies, disappeared momentarily and then came back, rubbing the arc of her …
Review: Murder Ballad Murder Mystery by Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2009
The clowning was lots of Keystone Kops sort of stuff and some decadent red-neck carrying on. Most of the time the obviously talented musicians were mangling the tunes just the way that the whooping and hollering actors were mangling the stories.
Murder Ballad Murder Mystery is imagined and delivered as a clown show balanced precariously on deep and true traditional ballads. Those ballads are deep, because stories of passion, violence and murder are rooted somewhere pretty close to our shared DNA. True, because they contain archetypes of our culture: the restless husband; the innocent and defenseless girl-child; the rapscallion, the rapist, and the rowdy. Including, of course, musicians and theatre folk. Playwright Elizabeth Doss, who appears here as …
Review: Black Snow by Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 05, 2009
Tutto Theatre gave us a bouncy, funny harlequin-esque farce. Gabriel Luna was comically suicidal as the novelist seeking to deal with the happily deranged theatre company.
I saw one of the concluding performances of Black Snow but because of visitors and a trip out of town I did not have the time to review it in a timely fashion. My memory is that Tutto Theatre gave us a bouncy, funny harlequin-esque farce. Gabriel Luna was comically suicidal as the novelist seeking to deal with the happily deranged theatre company. Smaranda Ciceu as the Stanislavsky figure was a hoot -- a senile Groucho Marx …
Review: Ophelia, adapted from Shakespeare by Dustin Wills for Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 12, 2008
Wills’ script is a dog’s breakfast of texts, mixing contemporary adolescent slang (“Oh, shit!”) with pseudo-Elizabethan talk with Shakespeare’s 24-carat verse from other characters or other plays jammed unexpectedly into the mouths of the Ophelias.
The Ophelia – or Ophelias – of Tutto Theatre Company appearing currently at the Blue Theatre in east Austin is a puzzle and a frustration. The more deceiv’d Ophelia of Shakespeare has deep resonance in our tradition. She is the enamoured, disappointed, dutiful daughter who returns her lover’s tokens per her father’s instructions and in complying with filial and social obligation becomes the pawn and victim of both sides. Trapped in an impossible situation, powerless and then …