Recent Reviews
Review: Les Miserables by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on September 13, 2019
The performances were Broadway quality with Mary Kate Moore as Fantine as a clear standout. Her vocal control was matched by her on-stage panache. When performed with all cylinders like this, Les Misérables will always be epic in scope and blistering in production.
Published in 1862, Les Misérables was Victor Hugo’s magnum opus. A historical novel that chronicled 17 years of the life of Jean Valjean while exploring the timeless topics of truth, law, redemption, and grace against the brooding background of the upcoming French Revolution. The story has found its way on to the stage and screen in many incarnations and its latest treatment does not lose sight of the grandiose vision of the original. Powerhouse …
Review: Cyrano de Bergerac by The Archive Theater Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 03, 2019
Exceptional principal actors, a large ensemble of standouts, gallantry, poetry, combat and love; this immensely complex play is delivered with zeal and panache. CYRANO DE BERGERAC is not to be missed.
Edmond Rostand wrote Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897, a play about a 17th-century French soldier and poet. As the inaugural production of Jennifer Rose Davis’s Archive Theater Company, this archival play is an Austin original. So why Cyrano de Bergerac? It’s not the nose or the methods of antique warfare; the big heart of the romantic story is unrequited love. Audiences have had an instinctual feel for that for 130 years. Anyone who has …
Review: The Mamalogues by Color Arc Productions
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 01, 2019
Lisa B. Thompson's fictional support group for Single Black Mothers points out the pains and joys of all mothers, regardless of color, in dozens of imaginative scenes. And who brought the pecan pie? Must you ask?
Playright Lisa B. Thompson has a commitment and an almost uncanny gift for describing, embodying, and sharing her lived Black experience with all other ethnicities and cultures. Whatever the source, her writing is very good at showing the world life lived in the Black community. Fo example, her award-winning Monroe gave an almost ethnographic description of a Black community surviving in Jim Crow times, and how one character used pie-baking as an instrument of …
Review: Dance Nation by Theatre en Bloc
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 31, 2019
DANCE NATION is cruel to its subject matter, with a subtheme so strong the work could play as a new Halloween horror show. Many won't "get it" but they'll be entertained by wild and risqué humor. It's not a "woke" play.
Dance Nation plays in the same league as Heathers, Pitch Perfect, and Bring It On. The show competes well with them, offering a new set of jokes and gags about teens and sub-teens with team performance circuit dementia, and about their obsessive moms living through their offspring. The complex play, however, is not a one-trick pony, neigh!, but multifaceted and multilayered, with relatively unresolved subplots. Surprises and shocking scenes abound throughout. About two-thirds of …
Review: TRANSom by Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 24, 2019
Direction by Scheps and O'Rear melds cast members' stories of transgender life, enacted as much as told, into a smooth, coherent narrative.
Transom is a play about found families and the demands they place on their members to keep them together. This gives the play the dramatic tension that makes for engaging stage presentations. The play being about a family of transgender and gender nonconforming individuals only emphasizes its point that, in its essence, a found family is no different from otherl families. The cast and most of the production staff are transgender pesons. That …
Review: American Blood Song by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 11, 2019
Trouble Puppet performs this operetta as a linear tragic narrative, with the company's characteristic innovative unpredictability. Puppeteers wear period costumes and acceptably period hairstyles while singing their characters' roles.
“Crazy cold ‘way down there…”, the memorable line from the 60s band Blood, Sweat, and Tears seems like a prophecy of 2019’s Trouble Puppet Theater Company original production of American Blood Song, A Puppet Operetta of the Donner Party (ABS). The show is about nothing but loss, loss of country, loss of life, loss of possessions, loss of family, loss of mind, loss of self-respect, loss of morality, loss of ethics, loss of faith, loss of …