The Geology of Art: Fusebox Festival 2018
Art is like a rock; or, more precisely, a cross-disciplinary performing and visual arts festival is like a geological epoch.
Tarra Gaines
Outstanding Performances: A Vibrant Memphis at TUTS
The Tony Award-winning musical Memphis tells a rollicking story of the dawn of rock ’n’ roll in the segregated south that rejects black and white simplicity.
The Big Surround: Nancy and Tarra talk Immersivity on Texas Stages
Since we (Nancy Wozny & Tarra Gaines) have an ongoing conversation on what defines an immersive performance, we decided to share some of our adventures and to make some of our endless road trip banter public.
Remembering Harris Wittels: Stephanie Wittels Wachs’s New Sad/Funny Memoir
“Tragedy is the cure for anxiety,” says Stephanie Wittels Wachs of the unwanted and much too costly life and death lesson grief taught her after her comedy prodigy brother Harris Wittels died of a heroin overdose in 2015.
The Front Edge of Theater Making: AT&T’s Off Broadway on Flora
Can any image fill a performing arts venue programmer or curator with more dread than the sight of an empty, darkened theater?
Re-gendering History: ‘Men on Boats’ at MST
History may be written by the victors, as the saying goes, but fundamentally history is written by the writers and the landscape of history etched into images by the cartographers, though they are perhaps paid by those victors.
Dream Fest: Stages Repertory Theater Launches Sin Muros: A Latina/o Theatre Festival
If good playwrights tend to have discerning ears for the language and voices around them, then perhaps those wanting to produce a new kind of theater festival need to become the most sensitive of auditory aficionado as well. Kenn McLaughlin, artistic director of Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, seems to subscribe to this theory because when the company began organizing their new play-reading event that would become Sin Muros: A Latina/o Theatre Festival, he knew the first act of creation was to be quiet and listen.
Fun at the Laupera: Traci and Tony’s Unusual New Year’s Eve at Rec Room
Girls, and boys, may just want to have fun on New Years Eve, but for many people the celebratory countdown to some second when the Earth has managed another full orbit around the Sun without getting struck by an asteroid makes for a pretty crappy holiday.
The Excitement of Shift: Joseph Keckler Comes to the Long Center
Last April, as the evening weekend revelries began at Fusebox, Austin’s annual cross-disciplinary arts festival, performer Joseph Keckler took the stage at Al Volta’s Midnight Bar.
Neverland No More: Sender at the Rec Room
As a critic, I try to stay open to every theatrical form, genre and story to lay aside my personal preferences and tastes so that they don’t prejudice my views of any specific play and production.
Jane Austen, Trailer Park Boys & a Rhinoceros: Holiday Stages in Texas
As a curmudgeonly connoisseur of holiday performing arts, I’m always on the lookout for the innovative, quirky or simply new shows to devour like Christmas candy each most-wonderful-time-of-the-year
Dinner of Doom: 4th Wall opens its final season with Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced
Great drama is seldom blatantly didactic, but on occasion theater does gift us with certain life-tips to aid us along our journey.