Recent Reviews
Review: Guys and Dolls by SummerStock Austin
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 28, 2015
This is a production for the friends and families of the large cast and crew of the show, and they have a right to be thrilled and satisfied with this showing of a canonical Broadway and Hollywood musical.
Summer stock is theatre camp for musical theatre students and emerging professionals. Directors Michael McKelvey and Ginger Morris remain true to the concept in their production of Guys and Dolls.Their educational efforts over the years are laudable, but audience expectations for Guys and Dolls are sky-high, and any stock production put together in two weeks or so can hardly hope to meet even the most forgiving, reined-in expectations. Guys and Dolls is a famous Broadway …
Review: MAST by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 27, 2015
Avoiding the overused theme of the scattering of lives in global war, Elizabeth Doss uses the ocean as her overarching metaphor. Lives drift, drown, sail or find new lands.
The Paper Chairs theatre collective has a reputation for innovative and experimental productions. In almost six years of existence the company has gained skill and recognition in the Austin theatre scene, and MAST by Artistic Director Elizabeth Doss may prove to be its strongest edge-dancing production yet, and artfully produced. The play has at its core incidents and relationships in Doss’s family tree in World War II and the generation that followed, but one wouldn’t …
Review: Sophisticated Ladies, the Duke Ellington musical by Zach Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 21, 2015
Talent, thy name is Jennifer Holliday, brought to Austin for this production and all by herself the guarantor of the success of the show.
Zach Theatre's production of Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies in the Topfer Theatre is spectacular. The Topfer is gaining a reputation for high-tech productions that dazzle large audiences. Sophisticated Ladies bodes well to enhance that reputation and with its production values to grant some sophistication to its design aestheticsl, although some more work remains to be done. This evening is a song cycle of Duke Ellington’s songs and music, tied in non-narrative fashion to Ellington’s rise …
Review: When The Rain Stops Falling by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 08, 2015
The playwright, director and cast achieve something beyond mere storytelling. They touch our emotions deeply and evoke the biggest questions and mysterious interconnections of human life.
Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling is an extraordinary piece of writing. Norman Blumensaadt's staging of it at the Vortex is an astonishing feat of theatre. This is a far journey into a mystery and into unknowing: there's a puzzle to be unravelled at the core of it, but the real puzzle is the arbitrary and capricious nature of our very existence. Does that sound obscure? These interconnected stories of four generations span some …
Review: Sacred Space by Exchange Artists
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 30, 2015
The cast danced and shared ideas on the prospects of an afterlife, and then the Flight Attendant appeared, played by Bridget Farr. She dragged away the focal pilgrim, Anne Hulsman, on magical realist travels around the world.
Exchange Artists have brought another highly creative, original production to Austin. Sacred Space has just finished up its single weekend in performance at the Little Pink Monster Gallery in the Canopy arts complex in East Austin. The show, very much under the radar, offers a showcase for devised and improvised work. At the same time, the show is partly scripted, the credit going to Rachel Weise and Katherine Craft, the co-artistic directors of the company. …
Review: The Importance of Being Earnest by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 28, 2015
Kara Bliss's Lady Bracknell has just the right no-nonsense insistence along with the humorlessness that makes the character so comic.
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is so exquisitely written that it will probably never fall out of fashion. Wilde mocks fashion and the fashionable; he presents us with chaps who are guileful but goodhearted deceivers and young ladies dizzy with self importance and good manners. And of course there's Aunt Agatha, the ultimate dragon lady, arbiter of all that's good taste and acceptable in polite society. The script is balanced, well plotted, vivid …