Review: Gunilla Klingberg at Rice Gallery
It’s no secret that corporate logos abound in the modern consumerist landscape of America. It’s not every day that you see them transformed into the grist of art, and yet in the wake of Pop Art, it can’t be said to be that uncommon either. With her new installation at Rice Gallery, Wheel of Everyday [...]
Review: The Language Archive
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Mary says to George in Julia Cho’s The Language Archive (at Stages Repertory Theatre through March 3). “I’ve never understood what you’re trying to tell me.” And right there brings us to the crux of the problem in this endearing drama [...]
Review: Verdi’s Macbeth
Heavy is the head that wears the crown—especially when you murdered your predecessor. Set in post-apocalyptic Scotland, Opera in the Heights’ production of Verdi’s Macbeth captures something new in Shakespeare’s classic from neon purple, lime, and yellow-wigged witches to shopping carts and barbed wire. Pulled off with passion, Macbeth [...]
Response: Performance Response to Tony Feher Free Fall
Performance installation puts people in a state of unease, possibly because they don’t know where they are on the continuum observer and participant. Most people got there early enough to have some fun with Tony Feher’s hanging tiny water bottles, warming up the space, getting [...]
Response: The Submission
House lights go out on dim blue work lights as the actors take their places. Scene lights come up stage left on a set platform. Two males, seated, at a coffee shop. One jabs away at a logo-glowing Apple laptop while the other plods through a pre-digital paper manuscript. For a moment I imagine that [...]
Review: Wittenberg
Stages Repertory Theatre’s rendering of David Davalos’s delightfully quirky Wittenberg may be the one show in Houston you shouldn’t miss. As director Josh Morrison says in his program note, “I would love audiences to experience a debate of faith versus reason in a witty, fun [...]
Review: Don Giovanni
Women large and small, old and young, from Spain to Turkey— the seductive Don Giovanni has conquered them all. And beyond the lecherous main character is laughter, love, jealously, and fiery hell for those who do evil. Widely thought to be the best opera ever written, any production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is held to [...]
Review: Camelot
The reasons to head out to the Hobby Center to see the Theatre Under the Stars’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot are the songs and the assembly of talent. Adultery in castles is always a fun subject too. Sure, it’s a chestnut — dated, showing its age on several fronts — but come on [...]
Response: The Menil’s fake deaccessioning scandal
Most Houston artists – for that matter, most artists living anywhere – would be thrilled to have an artwork acquired by the world-renowned Menil Collection and displayed for nearly two years before it was rotated off view. They certainly wouldn’t take to the homepage of a statewide nonprofit visual arts website – whose founder and [...]
Review: Ubu Roi
After a week of watching the powerful – as in Lance Armstrong – fall from grace, it seems timely that Alfred Jarry might make an appearance about now, this time in the form of the young actor Lorenz Lopez in Classical Theatre Company’s (CTC) production of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, a play that is rarely produced, [...]
Review: Gilad Efrat – Negev
In his latest exhibition at Inman Gallery, Israeli artist Gilad Efrat ruminates on the desert landscape of his childhood: the Negev which stretches along the southern triangular tip of Israel and is in many ways the proverbial no-man’s land. Working from photographic material, including images he shot on his own travels, Efrat captures the static [...]
Briefly Noted
There’s always more art out there than we can fit into A+C, but we couldn’t let 2012 end without giving these shows a shout-out. You, in turn, should give them a visit. Shane Tolbert: Talk of Montauk – The Houston painter returns from an Edward Albee Foundation residency with suitcase-sized canvases, some of which nevertheless [...]
