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: 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 [...]
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, [...]
Young Man at Play
The New Adventure of Black Lab Theatre Company Jordan Jaffe was your typical highly motivated, successful college student, son of two highly motivated, successful parents, pursuing a degree in Asian studies at Rice that had already inspired him to study Japanese and add Mandarin Chinese to his academic calendar. Until he fell in with a [...]
Noble Knights and Windmills
TUTS Takes on a Pair of Classics During the 1960s — like our own, a time of hope and, if possible, even more traumatic change — Broadway composers, lyricists and playwrights sought inspiration from two dazzling blasts from the past: a pre-English king who dreamed big dreams about noble knights and fair ladies, and a [...]
Review: Love Goes To Press
Main Street Theater November 23-December 23, 2012 This just in: the battle of the sexes meets the front in Main Street Theater’s rediscovered mid-40’s wartime romance Loves Goes To Press by Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles. Despite the welcome presence of pre-feminist leading women [...]
Holiday Gems
There’s a bounty of holiday art activity every year, from the mainstays like A Christmas Carol and The Santaland Diaries at the Alley Theatre to Houston Ballet’s ever-popular Ben Stevenson production of The Nutcracker, this year with principal Amy Fote giving her last performance on a Houston Ballet stage. The Ensemble Theatre returns to Cinderella, [...]
Review: Body Awareness
It might sound a bit risqué when you first hear that a theatre company called Stark Naked is putting on a play called Body Awareness. But despite its title, Annie Baker’s 2008 one-act play has much more to do with the mind and with psychological evasiveness than with [...]
Review: Jekyll & Hyde
Guys can be so moody. Just in time for Halloween, Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS) returns to Jekyll & Hyde, with a newly conceived production, and the beginning of a long national tour that will end again on Broadway. Houston’s most famous homegrown musical premiered at the Alley Theatre in 1990, and went on to [...]
Review: Miss Julie
Classical Theatre Company September 26-October 14, 2012 Swedish playwright August Strindberg, whose death marks its one-hundredth anniversary this year, is remembered both for his hand in shepherding drama away from overelaborate plotting towards a pared down naturalism [...]
Review: Life Is a Dream
Main Street Theater September 20 – October 21 Main Street Theater opened its 38th Season with Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s poetic masterpiece, Life Is a Dream. Written in the 17th century, the work questions what it means to be fully awake and if it is only in our dreams [...]
Theater in the Raw
Strong Acting Defines Stark Naked Theatre When I first met Philip Lehl and Kim Tobin over a Chinese lunch in the early spring of 2006, while I was working on my musical Deep in the Heart, I had no idea how much the future held for them. Then again, neither did they. I knew they’d [...]
