Recent Reviews
Review: The Sound of Music by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 30, 2022
Dave Steakley succeeds with an innovative staging concept and sparkling cast for THE SOUND OF MUSIC; he mostly succeeds in tying fraught pre-Anschluss Austria to today's beleaguered United States.
Austin's Zach Theatre needed a big one to bust free of the COVID oppression that harmed this and other venues, and Dave Steakley has delivered handsomely. Who doesn't know The Sound of Music, the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that garnered an armload of Tony awards and was the basis of the 1963 film that swept the Oscars? Steakley's challenge: use that familiar material but make it new. He succeeds with an innovative staging concept …
Review: Undark - A Radioactive Puppet Play by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 13, 2022
This workshop production with gaps and taped-up aspects gives a foretaste of another deeply socially concerned work to be done by Trouble Puppet master Connor Hopkins.
Trouble Puppet Theater’s first production in a while, Undark: A Radioactive Puppet Play, remains in development. The performances at the Vortex in east Austin were supported by a Workshop Grant from the Jim Henson Foundation. That organization, the Olympus of puppetry, may give a full production grant to Undark for production in about a year’s time if its leadership ultimately likes what it sees in the workshop edition. That is the stimulus for the full …
Review: The Mad Scene by Performa/Dance
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 12, 2022
MAD SCENE from Jennifer Hart offers a goo of images and actions, soaring and crawling, angelic and monstrous, unified and diverse, harmonizing and chaotic. Fame and notoriety are empty. We have left the Louis XIV 's ballets far behind.
Something snapped deep in Jennifer Hart‘s brain. Mad Scene flowed out, a goo of images and actions, all soaring and crawling, angelic and monstruous, unified and diverse, harmonizing and chaotic. Time played for putty in Hart’s hands, with a giant set of the great hall of Versailles in projection and a disco ball over stage center. Projections and video gave us more views of Versailles, woodland Texas, and stone architecture, locations unknown. The first dance …
Review: Saint Joan, God's Mouthpiece by Lighthouse Theatre
by Justin M. West
Published on June 03, 2022
This rewrite of GBS's SAINT JOAN is grand in its story but tightly knit in presentation, inspiring without being overly reverent, which keeps it accessible. Humor peppers the updated, provocative script.
I have long known about Lighthouse Theatre, which has a residency at the Crestview Baptist Church in Georgetown, TX. My lack of attendance at any of the company’s performances is probably due in no small part to my own confidence that, upon setting foot in a church, I would immediately burst into flames and ruin whatever production I had come to see on account of being a godless heathen of a frequently outspoken ilk. I …
Review #2 of 2: Mack and Mabel, A Musical Love Story by Alchemy Theatre Company, Austin
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on June 03, 2022
The story of Mack and Mabel is not often told but it is a story as old as Hollywood itself, full of goals and aspirations as big as the letters of the famous Hollywood sign. And as with many Greek myths, the higher one reaches for dreams, the farther there is to fall.
Mack and Mabel opened on Broadway in 1974, garnered eight Tony nominations, and closed after only eight weeks. It is known for the songs “I Won’t Send Roses,” “I Promise You a Happy Ending," and "Hundreds of Girls" which were composed by Jerry Herman, who also brought the world La Cage aux Folles and Hello, Dolly! The musical was written by Michal Stewart, known for Bye Bye Birdie, Carnival!, and 42nd Street. The debut production …
Review: Dot by Colman Domingo, Ground Floor Theatre
by Justin M. West
Published on May 31, 2022
Colman Domingo's flawed script for DOT and Lisa B. Thompson's direction hinder, over-shout the talents onstage.
The Ground Floor Theatre has a solid reputation for producing progressive and thought-provoking pieces. The last show I reviewed here, Some Humans Were Harmed…, left a lasting impression on me in a way that few have. So, too, did writer Lisa B. Thompson’s prior production, The Mamalogues, though I failed spectacularly to produce a review. I was therefore beyond disappointed to find that Thompson’s work as a director on Coloman Doming's Dot so widely misses …