Recent Reviews
Review: La Pastorela Audaz by Teatro Audaz
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 22, 2022
LA PASTORELA is usually intended for young audiences -- but it's a great amusement for all. José de Hoyos as Luzbelle the devil and Miranda Valdez-Williams as a Tik-Tokking shepherd were especially funny.
Almost all of us in the United States are deeply embedded in winter holiday traditions that we first encountered as children. Most typically, the church christmas pageant walking through the Biblical recital of the Christmas story or, for those less religious, Dickens' Christmas Carol, that enduring, sentimental admonition to love others. Both follow familiar, well-defined scripts. La Pastorela, a Christmas tradition deeply rooted in Mexico, instead offers variations of a basic scenario, the shepherds' travel …
Review: We're Here by Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on December 14, 2022
WE'RE HERE was yet another gemlike dance event given to the world by the Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company. They are indeed here, and we wish fervently for them to stay.
We’re Here was the December 2022 offering of the Austin-based Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company, headquartered at Café Dance in west Austin. Ever-innovative, Dunn Hamrick the choreographer and her company formulated a visual guide for the aid and assistance of audience members. It was a rebuslike mural or map of symbols (hiking boot, cloud, microwave, etc.) taking us from the beginning to the end of the show. So we wouldn’t forget, the hardcopy map covered …
Review: The Gulf by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 10, 2022
These extraordinary women actors explore tensions and attractions with a script at times wildly comic, at times charged with emotion. Highly recommended.
Two women. Together in a boat on a shallow bay in the Gulf of Mexico. Nobody else around. Another boat passes at high speed, and the women shout mocking defiance, yell bad advice, give them the finger. No, this isn't a story of victimization. This seventy-five minutes delivers turbulence and a torment, but those are interior emotions. Playwright Audry Cefaly places her characters in the watery expanse of Mobile Bay or Florida's Redneck …
Review: A Sherlock Holmes Christmas by The Archive Theater Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 21, 2022
The venue is comfortable, the story's satisfying, the cast and staff are friendly, and the Christmas cheer comes happily sneaking up even on the occasional Grinch. Afterward, I was ready to face the holiday season!
Not to bah, humbug! about it, but December is a difficult month for theatre reviewers. And December—okay, the Christmas season—starts in mid-November. With a sigh, I tot it up once again this year: stages across the CTXLT region are putting up thirty-eight holiday plays this holiday season. THIRTY-EIGHT! Including eight versions of A Christmas Carol. EIGHT! Oh, for some variation! A cracking good mystery, for example. Though preferably not Ken Ludwig's The Game's Afoot, or Holmes for the Holidays, opening …
Review: A Short Stop at the Long Time by BLiPSWiTCH
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 21, 2022
Weather and a power failure posed no obstacles to BlipSwitch's creative dance interpretations of Frank Curry's gray-scale images of humans as insects. Blipswitch is nimble, and its doughty fans scramble to keep up.
Pivot. Adapt. Repeat. These might be the watchwords of Blipswitch Movement's latest success A Short Stop at The Long Time, a highly successful performance on November 19, 2022. The show offered a multimedia show in the truest sense. The event was a fine arts dance performance wrapped around a photography exhibit, performed to an electronic soundtrack composed for the event. Afterward, the up-and-coming synth band Grand Maximum, performed live to all hours. The final …
Review: These Shining Lives by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2022
Director Lara Toner and the Mary Moody Northen Theatre deliver a sincere, open-hearted performance of a script that concentrates exclusively upon harm caused initially by ignorance and subsequently by willful ignorance.
At the heart of These Shining Lives are the remarkable matched performances of Sonia Mariah Fonseca and Christina Hollie as young industrial workers painting luminiscent numbers onto clockfaces at the Radium Dial Company in the 1920's and 1930's. Lara Toner's choice in casting and directing them was perceptive. Her direction brings them gradually together, a melding of opposites. Fonseca—petite, initially timid, and vulnerable—is Catherine, the lead, with a heartbreaking story arc. A young …