Recent Reviews
Jennifer Hart Redux -- Anticipating Anthropocene
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 21, 2025
Jennifer Hart shares all the color, dance, thoughtfulness, and humor of her mind in wildly extravagant measure.
Jennifer Hart, again Comes the indefatigable Jennifer Hart with Anthropocene, another multimodal performance work, ,premiering August 15, 2025 at the Austin Ventures Studio theatre. Hart and her company, Performa/Dance, will present another characteristically serious, accessible, and humor-filled performance with her troupe of skilled, ballet-based dancers and well-trained actors. Performa/Dance was formed in 2014 with co-artistic director Edward Carr, who has now retired. Jennifer Hart works her advantages in performance as the curriculum director of Ballet …
Review: Inside My Walls by Ishida Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 26, 2025
Ishida Dance's dazzling professionalism serves up intense, innovative performance magic. The company plans to base itself both in Houston and here in Austin.
Inside My Walls is indescribably beautiful. So thoroughly apt, and so difficult to convey in words. The onslaught of imagery and the feelings that ride along with it hurt as much as they arouse, but no one wants them to stop. And the dark at the corner of the stage looms as the portal to our memories of loss and pain. Out of it come contesting siblings, lovers, workers, and visitors from beyond. We watch …
Review: Fat Ham by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 25, 2025
FAT HAM's bright, kinetic world is far from Shakespeare's Hamlet; its stories of changing Black family life are touching, comic, and eminently satisfying.
We were surprised, captivated, and thoroughly entertained by Austin Playhouse's production of Fat Ham, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama directed by Ben Wolfe. The notion of combining Shakespeare's dark plot and soaring verse with the story of a Black family in Appalachia could have been a bridge too far, but playwright James Ijames adapted only the sketchiest outlines of Hamlet while delving deeply into family dynamics, frustrations, and existential musing. With the barest …
Review: Interiors by Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 16, 2025
Alyson Dolan, Drew Silverman and six gifted, disciplined dancers created a memorable evening of dance despite the CoAs parsimonious support for the arts.
Interiors inaugurates the reformed and renewed KDH Dance Company under the artistic direction of Alyson Dolan, with Drew Silverman as co-artistic director and resident composer. The new management may have felt that it had something to prove, but if so, they not only proved it but may have turned a corner on the winding pathway of Austin contemporary dance. And they did it in a time of constricting resources and a worrisome social climate. The …
Review: Anton Chekhov Is A Tasty Snack by Penfold Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 11, 2025
Are theatre people beautiful? Vulnerable? Ridiculous? (All of those?) How about Chekhov? This smart, kinetic farce will fill you in!
Quick quiz: Identify yourself: are you/were you - a theatre kid/college actor/theatre artist (struggling or not)/theatregoer? Are you nerdy enough to know who Anton Chekhov was? Do you know any of his plays? Have you acted/designed/produced any of his plays? Do you like farce? Not slapstick, exclusively; think something more like The Play that Goes Wrong but without the pratfalls. Are theatre people beautiful? Vulnerable? Ridiculous? (All of those?) Your answers don't matter; go see …
Review: Unbury Your Gays by Broad Theatre, Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 06, 2025
Your BFF may not be one, and Maxine Dillon's piece about growing up, growing away, and coming out reminds us. Unburying doesn't have to be literal.
BFF. Best friends forever, right? Think back. Or look around. How often does that cheery acronym come true? Maxine Dillon's Unbury Your Gays offers a lively series of scenes that turn out to be a meditation on that question. In retrospect -- both the playwright's and my own -- there's a faint, bitterness to what is otherwise an entertaining and often amusing story. That's not the fault of the production, for director Kairos Looney cast …