Reviews for touring company Performances
Review: SIX, the musical by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on January 24, 2026
SIX of them. Diva queens, fast and funny, sometimes hard to follow, deliver goose-bump-inspiringly musical performances to create the soundtrack for thousands of future sleepovers.
Like most touring shows, SIX, created by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, is a powerhouse production with a giant fan following and a slew of awards including Tonys for Best Costume Design in a Musical and Best Original Score (Music and Lyrics). Marlow and Moss wrote SIX during their final year at Cambridge to offer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Inspired in part by a Beyoncé performance, Marlow proposed a retelling of the lives of …
Review: The Look of Love by touring company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 19, 2026
Mark Morris has always known what the world needs now, and this evening of innovative dance to Burt Bacharat's music is his latest monument of U.S. dance.
The Look of Love, choreographer Mark Morris’s long-touring dance and music show, is a monument of popular music and postmodern contemporary dance. The show, presented one night only at the Bass Concert Hall, the main facility of Texas Performing Arts on the UT Austin campus, amazed us with its artistic directness, and dances set to iconic works of popular music. The show was based in simplicity—walking paces, repeated arm gestures, straightforward entrances and exits---the kind …
Review: Beauty and the Beast by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on December 12, 2025
The touring version of Beauty and the Beast is Disney comfort food: tamiliar, targeted, and as comforting as fresh baked chocolate chip cookies.
Beauty and the Beast is a beloved Disney fan favorite that despite the addition of a few new songs does not stray very far from the original animated film. Like many Disney properties, the words “beloved” and “fan favorite” do not go nearly far enough. Just saying the title of this piece will get you the question, which one? Based on a 1740 fairy tale written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (later revised and published …
Review: The Outsiders by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on November 02, 2025
It was great. Truly entertaining, fast-pced, familiar, a story flowing fast and loose. Solid performances by an energetic young cast.
The Tulsa Race Massacre happened on May 31st and June 1st, 1921. Thirty-five square blocks of the neighborhood known as "Black Wall Street" were destroyed, thirty-nine Black people were killed and more than eight hundred were hospitalized. Approximately six thousand were imprisoned in detention camps. This event cast a long shadow over the city that a sixteen-year-old Susan Eloise Hinton began writing about in 1965. Hers was a world of deep-seated segregation, gang violence, parental …
Review: Kimberly Akimbo by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on October 09, 2025
In the title role as Kimberly, Ann Morrison Morrison, is a chameleon entertaining enough to do this production alone, but when you add in the incredible supporting cast, the resulting sum is much greater than its parts.
There are thousands of ways to tell a story and quite often the telling of the story is the story itself. Writers rely on old tropes like en media res, the hero cycle, or nonlinear narratives to tell a classic story in a new way. Sometimes this adds an extra dimension to the tale (e.g., Memento, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind), but often the storytelling style dominates the subject’s substance (looking at you ,Quentin …
Review: Moulin Rouge by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on May 31, 2025
Stretching the bounds of story, performance, and audience endurance, the surging, glowing, glittering MOULIN ROUGE is still an enjoyable (if exhausting) night at the theatre.
First it was a venue, then it was a movie, then it was a critically acclaimed Broadway musical, and now it 's a touring production. The Moulin Rouge, with its trademark red windmill on the roof, opened in Paris in 1889. It is best known as the home of the world-famous Can-Can Dance (a variation of the square line dance known as a quadrille) which was originally performed by the club’s courtesans. Founders Joseph Oller …