by Vanessa Hoang Hughes
Published on April 26, 2024
Into The Woods directed by Jenny Lavery was a joy to experience, a fine production of a great piece of art.
What goes down when unlikely stories intertwine? Can witches be right, and giants be good? Into the Woods by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim weaves numerous characters from different fairy tales into a single intertwining story. Wish fulfillment unravels in a whirlpool of chaos and confusion. The story depicts life, love, and loss with unlikely scenarios and Sondheim’s enchanting music. Even when dreams come true, not everything is as it seems; even when things go …
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 25, 2024
Bravo to the Baron's Men for their devotion to the craft and art of this ROMEO AND JULIET; may ever more Austinites rally to the Curtain Theatre to applaud their elegant, accurate productions.
Austin’s Shakespeare geeks — and there are some! — have the opportunity this season to enjoy the equivalent of a Romeo and Juliet cage match at the Curtain Theatre, the city’s virtually unknown gem of a venue, a folie commissioned by Richard Garriott on the north bank of the Colorado River twenty-five years ago. Done as a classic Elizabethan-style thrust stage of appromately quarter size, the Curtain is reached via rough, winding roads that descend …
by David Glen Robinson
Published on April 20, 2024
Far from film depictions of 1930's journalism, ABOVE THE FOLD shows a canny woman reporter confronting the hard-bitten boy's club of scandal reporting. A lurid puzzle, vivid characters, and a striking set raise the stakes.
Imagine a distorted thrust stage, visibly twisted back to the 1930s by the powerful flow of time. The playing space established on the concrete-floored quonset hut of Factory on Fifth is a very large rectangle. Two sides are the upstage portion, the long dimension established with a long, ornate hotel bar. The shorter side offers an exit door set in a floral-design wallpapered wall and, to the downstage end, an elevated area with 1930s-period couch, …
by David Glen Robinson
Published on April 01, 2024
Stephen Mills and Ballet Austin, immeasurably gifted, are at the forefront of the modern arts’ proud stride into the future. Change is not coming; it has arrived.
Such a cliché, visually stunning. But how necessary to convey an overall introduction to Poe / A Tale of Madness by Ballet Austin and Stephen Mills. Yes, visually stunning along with artistically, emotionally, intellectually, and esthetically stunning. Afterward, it was only to sit in the comfortable Dell Hall seat with private thoughts, feelings, and joy, waiting uncaringly for the noisy downtown Austin world to reclaim one’s senses. The ballet was one of the few …
by David Glen Robinson
Published on March 29, 2024
Will Gibson Douglas's fine directing stitches together a cartoonish plot, strengthened by excellent actors. Do YOU want to go back to the Ozzie-and-Harriet 1950s?
The first act of Home, I’m Darling stamps Ozzie and Harriet, British edition on our minds. The saccharine preciousness of the set is matched by the opening caricatured scenes of action. Later, with a line serving to cover the embarrassment of the play at having done that to us, one of the characters denounces the principals, Judy (Martina Ohlhauser) and Johnny (Tobie Minor), as having turned their lives into cartoons. Right, cartoons. But …
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on March 27, 2024
This WICKED TOUR keeps the dazzle while the leads remake and deepen the frenemies Elphaba and Glinda. Not just good and evil; this story calls into question the stories of history.
It seems a little odd to write an introduction to such a well-known musical phenomenon as Wicked, especially here in Austin in which despite the play’s already huge popularity it was touted by a media storm that included billboards, television commercials, and a bombardment of social media ads. Yet nowadays with ads tailored made for the individual thanks to invasive communication software, that could be just me. As I write this, my computer is probably …