Recent Reviews
Review: Wraith Radio by Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 30, 2023
The reveals of WRAITH RADIO, when they come, are well foreshadowed and satisfying—if, that is, yielding to the void can ever seem satisfying to those still quivering with life.
Chris Fontanes's parable Wraith Radio portrays delirium and last hours of an injured soldier isolated in some dark time and place. The work debuted in a shabby warehouse in South Austin in 2016. The playwright's ragtag Bottle Alley Theatre Company was born in an equally devastated punk locale in 2012, and they've crept from one found venue to another since—proof of the ingenuity and dogged determination of DIY theatre makers. The 2016 Wraith Radio brought …
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Review: The Art of Martyrdom (a Comedy) by Rita Anderson, presented by Different Stages
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 24, 2023
Playwright Rita Anderson's portrait of the nun Hrosvitha, the first female playwright, muddles an important story by viewing it through 21st-century lens. A talented cast and decisive director mostly save the day.
The Art of Martyrdom (A Comedy) is a play of magical realism, hybridity, social activism, sexual freedom, creativity, and church mockery, but not much so much about conflict and resistance. Playwright Rita Anderson often employs magical realism to shoehorn a wide array of issues into the themes of her plays, but this one gets to the far reaches of magical realism. The frame of the play is the story of Hrosvitha, a cloistered nun in …
Review: Julieta tiene la culpa by Bárbara Colio, Central Drama, Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 17, 2023
Bárbara Colio's remarkable script and Alejandro Pedemonte's direction of three striking, distinctly different actresses created a mesmerizing experience.
Within Austin's Ground Floor Theatre, an undefined space is set against a black background. The platformed stage is bare except for two long wooden benches. Verónica Pomata enters, lingers stage right, fidgets, checks her phone, looks back behind her; the seconds stretch out and expectation builds into suspense. Director Alejandro Pedemonte knows how to rivet the attention of a full house. When speech comes after that long, detailed silence, it's in Spanish. The full house …
Review: Thank You and Have A Nice Day by Summer Break Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 17, 2023
Monroe Oxley's quirky play about quirky people, a "trailer court" comedy without the trailer, is enjoyable—turning to tragedy, it only gets funnier.
Summer Break Theatre is largely a company of theatre teachers available to produce only one play a year as a group, during summer break. They are not alone in that: most theatre pros in Central Texas support themselves with career jobs outside theatre. Those full-time jobs are vocational activities, side hustles that provide almost all their income in our increasingly expensive Austin. Acknowledging that, Summer Break Theatre puts it all into one production per year. …
Review: The McAdo by Gilbert & Sullivan Austin
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 10, 2023
GSA's THE MIKADO, a brilliantly reimagined world-class opera take-off on THE MIKADO: Gilbert and Sullivan would be proud. Savoyards everywhere should come see it.
The 2023 grand production of Gilbert & Sullivan Austin (GSA), The McAdo, premiered June 9 at the Worley Barton Theater in north Austin after a monumental hiatus. Work on the clever relocation of The Mikado to Scotland, songs and characters intact, began well before the pandemic, which stopped all work on it. When it was deemed that the coast was clear, the show premiered in 2022. Immediately after the premiere performance, COVID rendered more than …
Review: These Events are Fortunate by Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 05, 2023
This company's dancers, with only a few spoken lines for humorous effect, were luscious to watch. All have mastered modern dance technique and the quick-firing energy of movement that created surprising moments throughout the show.
These Events Are Fortunate is a rather vague title for a time of life at the entryway to summer filled with hope and excitement just one week after Memorial Day. But the title raises a question—what events? —that the audience tries to answer while watching the performances of the highly skilled, trained, athletic, and attractive dancers of the Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company (KDHDC). As the website program notes: “Hamrick has created a world where …