Recent Reviews
Review: Stage Blood by Different Stages
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 15, 2026
Ludlam's rollicking comedy satirizes theatre personalities; at its center, Will Gibson Douglas makes it happen and gets some of the best punchlines.
Stage Blood is a long, rollicking comedy by satirist playwright Charles Ludlum. Different Stages threw it onstage at The Vortex on Manor Road to great success. The play is enjoyable for all, above all for those who have seen or read Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A traveling theatre company struggles at every stop to produce the ghost-ridden tale of the Prince of Denmark. The current stop is Pflugerville. And we have a story-within-a-story-within-a-story: a stereotypically disaffected stage …
Review: Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, The Stage, Austin
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 15, 2026
The Stage Austin delivers a haunting depiction Sam Shepard's violent desolation; Texans will recognize, New Yorkers probably not so much.
The intensity of Sam Shepard plays leaves audiences in search of refreshing towels and stiff drinks. The powerful cast in The Stage Austin’s production of Fool for Love offers watchers in the audience no respite from the emotional jangling imposed on us. Shepard’s plays rely on a significant recurrent theme, or leitmotif, of modern Western life. He frequently juxtaposes the struggles between those trying to escape the honky-tonk life and those sinking back into it. …
Review: Embodied by ATX Artists for Social Impact
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 01, 2026
Jazz and poetry in fluid mosaic presented a succession of views on the meaning of being human.
Cut to the chase. The highlight of this show was jazz singer Beau Briar’s delivery of two classics of 30s-40s jazz, “God Bless the Child” by Billie Holliday and Arthur Herzog, Jr. and “Lush Life” by Billy Strayhorn. Lights faded up on Briar, of compact build, in a curiously ill-fitting suit of mismatched separates that a well-heeled man of the 1930s might have worn to clubs. All of it was under perfectly coifed platinum blonde …
Review: Waiting/REX by Ishida Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 25, 2026
Brett Ishida and her company's muscular, imaginative magic trick: converting Oedipus Rex and Waiting for Godot into pure, silent modern dance.
The concept of Ishida Dance Company's contemporary dance performance waiting/REX amazes at first blush, being a companion presentation of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. The two together seem an odder couple than Estragon and Vladimir in Godot. Odder still, the abstraction and rendering of the plays in contemporary movement (no lyrics, no spoken lines) are surprisingly faithful to the narrative progress of both. Ishida makes the claim that waiting is the first …
Review: PATIENCE by Gilbert & Sullivan Austin, Jun 12 - 21, 2026
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 18, 2026
GSA's PATIENCE offers the best vocal talent in the region, comic opera singers who could hold forth on any musical stage, in a singularly frothy, light-hearted sex comedy.
Written in 1881, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience stands out as a singular frothy, light-hearted sex comedy unexcelled by anything else in Victorian theatre or modern Hollywood rom coms. The large cast of characters was all about love, falling into it as easily as one would trip into a mud puddle. Climbing out of it is much easier, except for the mud stains. The story of the operetta is that Reginald Bunthorne, the new lord of …
Review: Cabaret by Wonder Theatre, San Antonio
by Donna Provencher
Published on June 17, 2026
Under Blake Hamman's direction, this CABARET is an aesthetic feast of powerhouse performances, riveting spectacle and top-notch craft that jolts with sex and violence.
The Wonder Theatre’s Cabaret is certainly not your mother’s Cabaret, nor is it Liza Minnelli’s. Nor did director Blake Hamman intend for it to be. This Cabaret is unabashedly dark and atmospheric, unflinchingly sexual and graphically violent — at times to stunning effect, at times at its own expense. One thing is for certain: It will leave San Antonio audiences talking for years to come. Headlined by Grace Lynn in an unforgettable turn as Sally …