Recent Reviews
Review: Women in Search of Love by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 02, 2012
Ah, though, the women! They captured my heart.
Last Saturday's FronteraFest "Best of Week 3" brought us a lot of yin and very little yang. Of the five pieces brought forward, four were solos by actresses. Yang did hold its own. The six "Confidence Guys" who did improvised Mamet gave us that playwright's expletives, elisions, incomplete understoods and macho pushiness to the life. After a quick poll of the audience they played it as salesmen in a failing car dealership. Maybe it was …
Review: Somewhere in Utopia (A Travesty) by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2012
Face it: there's no use getting annoyed with the theatre of the absurd, no matter how confusing it may seen. Go ahead, get out of your comfort zone and stretch your mind. Maybe getting annoyed will do you good.
Face it: there's no use getting annoyed with the theatre of the absurd, no matter how confusing it may seen. Or even with the neo-theatre of the absurd such as this piece by Jared J. Stein, produced a good 50 years after the audacious thumbing-its-nose-at-the-bourgeois art style hit the European stages. In Somewhere in Utopia Stein portrays a dystopia: two principal characters are fixed unthinkingly before a television screen as the audience files into the …
Review: The Crapstall Street Boys by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 27, 2012
The table action is quick and menacing, presenting a grim dog-eat-dog story -- almost literally -- as YouLad is cast into subhuman circumstances.
Perhaps it's inherent to the art form, but I did have a moment of wondering whether we ought to be concerned about our Connor. The Crapstall Street Boys is captivating puppetry and story telling, as is always the case with the Trouble Puppet Theatre Company, a crew of talented and devoted colleagues and acolytes who've gathered around Connor Hopkins. This time the approach is announced as "Czech puppetry" -- small articulated figures at the end …
Review: Wicked by touring company
by Thaïs Hinton
Published on January 27, 2012
Wicked is a sympathetic tale of an underdog (after all, as Kermit sang, "It's not easy being green!"), diversity and profiling -- an examination of what it means to be good inside if you happen to look bad on the outside.
Everyone knows how Dorothy Gale came to Oz and killed the Wicked Witch of the West. Judy Garland and pals in the 1939 film by MGM dwell deep in American cultural consciousness, none of them more so than Margaret Hamilton as the vengeful Wicked Witch of the West. In the Oz depicted by the touring company of Wicked currently at UT's Bass Concert Hall we get to hear another side of the story, adapted from …
Review: The Crapstall Street Boys by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by Hannah Bisewski
Published on January 27, 2012
The sheer morbidity of The Crapstall Street Boys may remind you of how dark the fairytales of your childhood really were. Maybe this particular fairytale isn’t much of a parody after all.
As part of Austin’s 2012 Fronterafest Trouble Puppet Theatre Company stages performs a haunting and unapologetically macabre piece at their home venue the Salvage Vanguard Theatre. The Crapstall Street Boys by TP leader Connor Hopkins tells the story of a factory employing boys, located in the heart of a town overrun by monsters. YouLad’s parents sell him to the factory in exchange for the money that will buy them a “monster masher” to protect themselves, …
Review: The Alien Baby Play by Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2012
In this production Kathleen Fletcher will make you believe in the impossible, no matter how the script was produced.
Bethany appeared first to the Austin public and to friends of Tutto Theatre in the warm and supporting setting of a private home in Westlake, last weekend. About twenty persons gathered in a living room comfortably furnished with artwork, masks and handicraft from across the world. Bethany was pleased to see all these friends at her "mom's house." She hurried about, offered us cookies, disappeared momentarily and then came back, rubbing the arc of her …