Recent Reviews
Review: The Little Mermaid, Disney by Woodlawn Theatre
by Kurt Gardner
Published on July 01, 2016
Performances are mostly broad and intentionally cartoonish to appeal to the youngsters, but adults may find them wearying in the long haul.
Back in the ’90s, the Disney corporation began mounting phenomenally successful Broadway adaptations of their animated hits Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. So it was not at all surprising that they’d turn to their 1989 The Little Mermaid for the stage treatment. Running for 685 performances beginning in 2008, it was not quite as successful as its predecessors. A few changes to songs and characters were made to the show in 2012, …
Review: John Gabriel Borkman by Different Stages
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 26, 2016
In an end-of-career play better read than produced, King Henrik gives us a series of brilliant dialogues that are delivered lyrically by Ev Lunning, Jr.
John Gabriel Borkman is a legacy play about legacy. Ibsen wrote it in 1896, and it was his penultimate play, penned long after his reputation was established with such plays as A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People. His entire artistic work, or oeuvre, may be thought of as prefiguring 20th century modernism with its emphasis in theatre on realism. Plays explored psychological and social issues with characters speaking directly of them in …
Review: Buyer & Cellar by Zach Theatre - A Look into the Mind of the Fanatical Realism of a Struggling Actor
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on June 24, 2016
This is your chance to see an actor who has honed his craft and delivers it with an over-the-top vivacity that is purely endearing.
J. Robert Moore kicks down the fourth wall in the very first moments of Buyer and Cellar, Jonathan Tolins’ one-actor play that is making its local debut in Zach Theatre Company’s Kleberg Theatre. It’s not real, he says with a smirk. It’s not real ,he says with a giggle. It’s not real, he says with enthusiastic verve that is coyly coupled with what may be a sigh. What’s not real? The story of the play. …
Review: The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare, Something for Nothing Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 23, 2016
A key theme in this graceful staging of The Winter's Tale is that of authority -- both its just exercise and the due deference of those subject to it. But do not worry: All turns out well and the lost is found.
Station Eleven, a 2014 novel by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, set at an unspecified future date after Western civilization has collapsed, features an itinerant group of actors making their way in covered wagons across the dangerous regions of the depopulated northeastern UInited States. They pull into hamlets widely scattered in that wilderness and earn their food by performing Shakespeare's plays for inhabitants otherwise completely deprived of literary culture and wider social contact. I …
Review: The Gondoliers, or The King of Barataria by Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Austin
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 19, 2016
THE GONDOLIERS has superb voices, wacky humor full of puns and droll stupidities, and its general topsy-turvyness leaves audiences howling with laughter.
The measure of any opera is the music, particularly the singing. In smaller urban markets such as Austin, the singing talent pool might seem somewhat restricted, as operatic voices are rare in the human species. Too often elsewhere in Austin’s musical theatre community, a production with a large cast may have only three to five singers good enough to tread the boards of a musical production. In contrast, all of the singers in The Gondoliers …
Review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by En Route Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 16, 2016
Strong emotion and struggle sweep us up, for the action is taut and compelling throughout. CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF is a lost world brought to life and made acutely relevant.
Austin's May rains raised more mosquitoes that you'd find in a Louisiana bayou, so En Route Productions ran the first weekend of its subtly powerful Cat on A Hot Tin Roof at the Off Shoot, the Rude Mechs' rehearsal studio in East Austin. That wasn't as difficult as you might think. Tennessee Williams' 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner takes place in a single setting, and C.B. Goodman's simple box set was made to be portable. The …