Reviews for Weird City Theatre Performances
Review: The House on Haunted Hill by Weird City Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 09, 2015
'House on Haunted Hill' is a brilliant work precisely because it doesn’t know what it wants to be—ghost story, slasher film, or crime drama/mystery.
Weird City Theatre has just opened its long-awaited new production, House on Haunted Hill, at Ground Floor Theatre on Austin’s east side. The show is something old and something new, a new stage adaptation (perhaps the only one) of the 1959 Vincent Price movie of the same name produced from the screenplay by Robb White. Today’s stage adaptation is by Robert L. Berry, a stalwart, multi-talented member of Weird City Theatre and other regional companies. Overall production …
Review: Grotesque and Arabesque - Poe Retold by Weird City Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 23, 2012
The stage artists showed profound respect for the literary artist, expressed in the best way they knew how to express it—on stage. At that moment I knew I could trust Weird City with my Poe.
I keep hearing the BLUE Theatre is closed or closing, but I keep going there to shows, despite the construction and demolition all around it. Now Weird City Theatre has installed in it Grotesque and Arabesque: Poe Retold, a bold collection of five one-acts abstracted from five of Poe’s horror stories. The story treatments were written by Weird City Theatre company members or associates, and they arrive on stage as one-act plays just in time for …
Review: Night of the Living Dead by Weird City Theatre
by Hannah Bisewski
Published on October 24, 2011
The action is as fast-paced as the film, and before long zombies are clawing at the Laffy Taffy innards of characters we meet only briefly.
A note to the nervous: Weird City Theatre’s Night of the Living Dead will have you clenching the edge of your seats, squinting into the darkness to see if a zombie is lumbering in your direction. Director John Carroll’s arrangement of the performance space at the Dougherty Arts Center manipulates spectators to facilitate that sense of terror. A runway extends from the traditional proscenium, separating the audience down the middle and leading to a smaller stage behind …
Review: Alvida and the Airship Pirates by Weird City Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 30, 2011
Our Alvida is a princess betrothed against her will to a vain and clueless prince from a nearby realm; Chris Romani as Mommy the queen is a sourpuss and Daddy the king is a timorous wimp. The needs of high politics and allilance must be served at all costs.
I was on the last airship with Alvida out of Weird City on March 12 and as sometimes happens with scribes errant, I got too busy and distracted to send her, author John Carroll and their band of adventurers a proper bread-and-butter note. Your mother may have admonished you about good manners, as does the mother of my children. It’s never too late, although sometimes it’s too late to do much good. I prefer the …
Review: The Servant Girl Annihilator by Weird City Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 02, 2010
'Servant Girl Annihilator' evokes grim true history of horror and victimization, and as a technique, the tour on the stage is halfway between conventional theatre and spook house.
For Halloween and for the following weekend your friends at the Weird City Theatre Company take you on a ghost tour. In the program they express special thanks to Monica Ballard and the Austin Ghost Tours for help with research on the late night attacks and rapes of 1884-1885 recalled in the piece. The title is taken from a comment in a letter written by the 23-year-old William Sydney Porter -- O. Henry -- who had …
Review: The Curse of the House of Usher by Weird City Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 25, 2010
The piece contains moments of intense drama, which the WCTC cast delivers in good style. In particular, there's a tearing, revelatory moment at the sudden death of Madeline.
Weird City Theatre Company specializes in the creepy, the spooky and the haunting. Their sense of "weird" shares something with the scruffy, quirky laid-back attitude of the now clichéd slogan "Keep Austin Weird," in that they are working on a shoestring and a vision. But they are really embracing a different notion of Austin creativity: the idea of translating otherworldly out-of-copyright works into evening séances to give us suspense, a shiver and a release.Patti Neff-Tiven's …