Recent Reviews
Review: Interiors by Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 16, 2025
Alyson Dolan, Drew Silverman and six gifted, disciplined dancers created a memorable evening of dance despite the CoAs parsimonious support for the arts.
Interiors inaugurates the reformed and renewed KDH Dance Company under the artistic direction of Alyson Dolan, with Drew Silverman as co-artistic director and resident composer. The new management may have felt that it had something to prove, but if so, they not only proved it but may have turned a corner on the winding pathway of Austin contemporary dance. And they did it in a time of constricting resources and a worrisome social climate. The …
Review: Anton Chekhov Is A Tasty Snack by Penfold Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 11, 2025
Are theatre people beautiful? Vulnerable? Ridiculous? (All of those?) How about Chekhov? This smart, kinetic farce will fill you in!
Quick quiz: Identify yourself: are you/were you - a theatre kid/college actor/theatre artist (struggling or not)/theatregoer? Are you nerdy enough to know who Anton Chekhov was? Do you know any of his plays? Have you acted/designed/produced any of his plays? Do you like farce? Not slapstick, exclusively; think something more like The Play that Goes Wrong but without the pratfalls. Are theatre people beautiful? Vulnerable? Ridiculous? (All of those?) Your answers don't matter; go see …
Review: Unbury Your Gays by Broad Theatre, Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 06, 2025
Your BFF may not be one, and Maxine Dillon's piece about growing up, growing away, and coming out reminds us. Unburying doesn't have to be literal.
BFF. Best friends forever, right? Think back. Or look around. How often does that cheery acronym come true? Maxine Dillon's Unbury Your Gays offers a lively series of scenes that turn out to be a meditation on that question. In retrospect -- both the playwright's and my own -- there's a faint, bitterness to what is otherwise an entertaining and often amusing story. That's not the fault of the production, for director Kairos Looney cast …
Review: Grand Hotel by Alchemy Theatre Company, Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 05, 2025
GRAND HOTEL is one of Austin's best theatre experiences of the current season. Maybe the very best. More, please; this is quality theatre art in every detail.
Grand Hotel is one of Austin's best theatre experiences of the current season. Maybe the best. This musical rendition of the complex, interlocking stories of guests and staff of a Berlin hotel began as a 1929 novel, followed by a play that same year, followed by a 1932 Hollywood-star-studded movie that was the uncontested winner of the 1932 Academy Award for Best Picture, followed by this 1989 musical theatre adapation. Entering the intimate Whisenhut theatre …
Review: Moulin Rouge by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on May 31, 2025
Stretching the bounds of story, performance, and audience endurance, the surging, glowing, glittering MOULIN ROUGE is still an enjoyable (if exhausting) night at the theatre.
First it was a venue, then it was a movie, then it was a critically acclaimed Broadway musical, and now it 's a touring production. The Moulin Rouge, with its trademark red windmill on the roof, opened in Paris in 1889. It is best known as the home of the world-famous Can-Can Dance (a variation of the square line dance known as a quadrille) which was originally performed by the club’s courtesans. Founders Joseph Oller …
Review: Here. Now. by Andrea Ariel Dance Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 17, 2025
HERE. NOW. was a patchwork quilt of diversity, teaching the lesson of the common search for identity, purpose, and meaning across every culture.
Andrea Ariel Dance Theatre (AADT) continues its winding path along the leading edge of the Austin performing arts community with Here. Now. The show is an essential dance show with exquisite live music accompaniment. The show is a compound of techniques and themes that Ariel has addressed in her 35-year Austin dance career. It intentionally incorporates elements of AADT’s Community Voices workshops, endowing it with reflections and echoes of AADT’s 2024 Borderless show. Leading-edge fine …