Recent Reviews
Review: Phantom of the Opera by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on April 28, 2017
By bringing each scene to a towering set in the middle of the stage, the director and designers show characters essentially trapped like mice by a prowling Phantom who may appear any place at any time. Yet this setting is intimate and realistic, even gritty.
The play begins with a count-down. An auctioneer’s resonant bellow calls out various lot numbers. The numbers eerily foreshadow as we approach the dreaded lot 666: a once shattered chandelier from what “some of you may recall the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera, a mystery never fully explained.” The chandelier has been fully restored for the auction and before the people’s eyes it bursts into life, rising phoenix-like to the ceiling and …
Review: Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill by Zach Theatre
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on April 20, 2017
Chanel as Lady Day is surrounded by ghosts, adoring fans, beautiful music, a supportive band and the shadowy pull of drug addiction. She owns every square inch of the stage.
Hey, Lady Day! NOTE: Zach Theatre is extending the production May 18 - June 11, 2017, and moving it to the Kleberg Stage. There is no question that her presence is regal if not refined. Chanel playing the titular role of Lady Day enters the stage via the audience. Her presence is so bold, sassy and commanding that spotlights are rendered redundant. She sweeps over the crowd with her gaze and the sterling luminosity …
Review: As You Like It by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 20, 2017
If you haven't made it out to the forest of Arden on the banks of the Colorado just twenty minutes from downtown, you should do penance. Or, better, get thee hence and hie thee thither. There's nothing remotely like it elsewhere in Central Texas.
The Baron's Men's staging of As You Like It is indeed just as Shakespeare aficionados like it. Of course there's the timbered Curtain Theatre, a tidy recreation of the half "O" of Elizabethan theatre, and there's the costume eye candy from Liegh Hegedus aided by Dawn Allee and her busy stitchery fairies. But more than anything there's the play itself, Shakespeare's whimsical tale of two aristocratic maidens running off to the magical forest of Arden where …
Review: Perfect Mendacity by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 19, 2017
PERFECT MENDACITY's two acts fly by. The knowledgeable audience appreciated a clever well executed script and familiar faces giving strong performances. The evening had just the right mixture of suspense, contradiction and comedy.
Playwright Jason Wells has contributed a lot to the brand Street Corner Arts has established since their 2011 debut. Perfect Mendacity is the third of his oeuvre they've put on stage at the Hyde Park Theatre, which gives them a clean sweep of this Steppenwolf playwright's 2008 - 2016 work. Men of Tortuga and The North Plan share the same sardonic cynicism about U.S. businesses and government. It's no surprise to learn that his latest work The …
Review: The Herd by Jarrott Productions
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on April 15, 2017
Though I was expecting a comedy I was treated to something better, something more deft, taut as a tendon, gritty and very endearing. The humorous lines popped and sizzled when they came.
“The quality of mercy is not strain'd, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” This quote is brought to mind several times during Jarrott Production’s Texas premiere of The Herd, a play about the stress-inundated lives of a family raising a very disabled child. And it’s no surprise Kinnear has chosen it. Not only is Portia's …
Review: Sister Act by Woodlawn Theatre
by Kurt Gardner
Published on April 13, 2017
The Tony-nominated musical comes to the Deco District's Woodlawn Theatre in a sparkling, superbly-acted production.
There are some pretty funny nuns in Sister Act, the hit musical based on the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg film of the same name. Set in 1978 Philadelphia, the show takes full musical advantage of the soul and disco sounds of the era – and the Woodlawn Theatre’s current production is a delight. Deloris Van Cartier is a diva who sings in a nightclub owned by her gangster boyfriend Curtis. When she inadvertently witnesses …