Recent Reviews
Review: Fresh Takes on Gilbert & Sullivan, Episode 3, by Gilbert & Sullivan Austin
by David Treadwell
Published on September 25, 2021
In FRESH TAKES some of your favorite cultural signposts have been moved a bit or translated to allow your neighbor to find the way through the delicious works of Gilbert and Sullivan. These bulwarks and frailties aren’t just nineteenth-century English, they are universally human.
The Fresh Takes on Gilbert & Sullivan project now streaming online offers food for thought. Opera can be a journey on which we members of a community travel together with the characters for a shared experience. Often, what keeps us as opera lovers on the journey are cultural references found in the words and music that act as road signs. Some of the most joyous moments come when we recognize the signs of shared experience, …
Review: Straitjacket: Variations on a Theme of Horror by Charles P. Stites
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 21, 2021
Charles Stites has the boundless ambitions of a sensitive, spiritual man and the grit of one with no expectation of redemption, contradictory attitudes that collide over the meaning of existence.
Okay, Charlie Stites, let’s get real. I’ve been avoiding you the way your principal character Dr. Daryl Standing tried to avoid Chin Lo, the murderous leader of the San Francisco tong wars. Not because I wanted to. No. Like Daryl Standing, I was intimidated, seeing failure and pain looming before me. Chin Lo took a month to execute an earlier offender, chopping pieces off him bit by bit, until the victim actually began to look …
Review: Fresh Takes on Gilbert and Sullivan, Episode 2, Gilbert & Sullvan Austin, Streaming Free of Charge through September 15, 2021
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on September 04, 2021
Episode 2 of FRESH TAKES certainly hits the mark and is a wild ride from start to finish. I don’t want to give away too much—this is a show you must see for yourself!
In 2019, Gilbert & Sullivan Austin was preparing an adaption of The Mikado in which they transferred the setting from Japan to Scotland. They had assumed when doing this a great deal of the of the libretto would have to be changed. To their pleasant surprise, fewer than twenty lines needed to be altered. This happy accident led them to conclusion that the works of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan team were just as worthy …
Review: rain falls special on me by Ground Floor Theatre, Austin
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 28, 2021
Wheelchair-bound, Mikey seems touched, creating a pseudo-home from nothing amid all his problems . . . but before long, we see that Mikey's only problem is that his heart is larger than his head.
After years waiting for the Covid 19 pandemic to blow through so we could go back to live theatre, rain falls special on me premiered at the prestigious Ground Floor Theatre on the east side. And Covid 19 hasn’t even blown through yet. The play is a literary telling of homeless stories through six human characters and one dog character. All seven are homeless and needed to address the hydra we label homelessness before we …
Review: In The Ether by ARCOS Dance
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 19, 2021
The graphics were spectacular, and the semiotics, the directions by sign and symbol through the livestream, were consistent and intelligently forgiving. ARCOS moves actively toward an ever more complex hybrid world.
The central motif of the livestreaming performance of In The Ether was two concentric black and white circles, unadorned but otherwise reminiscent of 1950s TV registrations. They pulsed, grew, shrank, hypnotized, and otherwise drew us into a sequence of dance and performance imagery arranged and manipulated on a series of webpages. The circles came back between segments, leading us through cyberspace. They were our robot guides, more so than the dreamy young human face that …
Review: Faraway, So Close by Ishida Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 16, 2021
This company is so devoted to conveying realities that their attack with intent, purpose, and love takes the audience to new places in their own minds and hearts.
Most of the elements of Faraway, So Close were delayed in showing one way or another by the pandemic lockdown suffered by most of the world. ISHIDA Dance has been centered in Austin only since 2019, and thus remains a very new dance company in our community. In our time of breakthrough viral infections, ISHIDA Dance’s show at the Dell Fine Arts Center at St. Andrew’s in far west Austin was one of breakthrough artistic …