Recent Reviews
Review: Peter Pan by touring company
by Vanessa Hoang Hughes
Published on December 13, 2024
The PETER PAN tour's a fun-for-all production with stunning performances, awe-inspiring theater magic, and a vivid story the entire family will remember.
Magical boy Peter Pan flies into the bedroom of ordinary kids Wendy, John, and Michael to take them on a riveting journey to a fantastical place called Neverland. This new adaptation touring the US is an exciting rewrite of the 1954 musical that featured Mary Martin and Cyril Richard. Writer Larissa Fasthorse of the Lakota nation and director Lonny Price have created a production that keeps all the charm and nostalgia of the original, reviving …
Review: A Christmas Carol 2024 by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 12, 2024
For better or worse, everyone should see this quintessential Austin Christmas experience at least once before they die!
Zach Theatre's rocking A Christmas Carol is an evening of delighted joy and celebration, as always—or, at least, as it has been throughout the past decade. Producing artistic director Dave Steakley's rethink of the Dickens cautionary tale has little of sin, gloom, avarice and death about it. It's anchored with the charismatic talents of Kenny Williams and Roderick Sanford, back again to charm us not only with their extraordinary voices but also with Williams' bouncy insouciance …
Review: HAMLET by Trinity University, San Antonio
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 14, 2024
The Trinity University cast of 39 had no doubts at all about the language, the length, or the deep themes of Shakespeare's most famous work. Anna Kate Vaughan's Hamlet is contemporary, swift, articulate, and intentional.
Trinity University's Dr. Stacey Connelly has taken on an audacious challenge: staging Shakespeare's Hamlet for the first time in the theatre program's 56-year history. This is Shakespeare's longest play, with texts published postumously in quarto and folio editions that hardly matched at all. Combining these, editors constructed the revered "complete text." Connelly appears to have staged that version, which runs three and a half hours, including about twenty minutes of break for intermission and scene …
Review: Brand by Lighthouse Theatre
by Charles Ney
Published on November 09, 2024
Lighthouse Theatre faced the many challenges of BRAND, Henrik Ibsen's rarely performed first drama. Zach Gamble in the title role and director Chase Wooldridge dug deep, and their work with the capable cast paid off beautifully.
What a pleasure to see a rarely performed Ibsen play fully mounted. In all my theatre travels, I have never encountered Brand, the playwright's first work. So what a treat it was to have the chance to see this piece on stage! As I watched this production unfold, I realized why this piece is so rarely done. The challenges are many. At the core is an icy uncaring protagonist who lives by the motto …
Review: Booger Red by Jim Loucks
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 23, 2024
In his portrait of a fundmentalist preacher father and an unwilling son, Jim Loucks uses quicksilver changes of voice, face, stances, emotion, and movement. And provides some spiritual insight, as well.
Any performance of material derived from one’s family has great authenticity. Jim Loucks emphasizes that his story is “loosely derived” from his life experiences with his father Booger Red, but the depths of feeling and insight revealed in this presentation cannot be gained other than by direct experience. Louck’s talent and commitment to the performance are heightened by the theatrical values of Booger Red. His movement, highly important and sometimes lacking in one-person …
Review: MJ, the musical by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on October 22, 2024
This jukebox yields forty spectacular greatest-hit numbers and a shallow portrait of the superstar.
The first album I ever bought was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, on vinyl no less, which was all the more significant because I didn’t even own a record player. Like many who saw the birth of MTV, the advent of the music video for the titular song, a mini-horror film, was momentous to me. Like many at the time, I had stopped following the outrageous exploits of Jackson’s career which had inarguably become more about …