artiFACTS: May 2013
After a successful run in Houston, Henry V, a joint production of Main Street Theater and Prague Shakespeare Company, heads to Prague for an October run. Main Street also launched the public phase of its capital [...]
Houston
Editor’s Remarks: May 2013
There’s something about Sean Shim-Boyle’s Project Row House installation, Salt House, that speaks to the moment. A second...
Morning Returns
The Catastrophic Theatre’s Mickle Maher Connection If you missed The Catastrophic Theatre’s production of Mickle Maher’s There Is a Happiness That Morning Is, don’t stress, it’s coming back, May 10-27 at their new digs on the docks. Catastrophic has quite an impressive track record with Maher, starting with The Strangerer, followed by [...]
Uncharted Waters Coming to Anya Tish Gallery June 2013
The works of Joan Hall and Paul Booker will be featured in a unique 2 person exhibition in...
The Best & Only Palestinian Film Fest in the South
When we first meet editor Paul Barrow, the protagonist of Molly Smith Metzler’s Close Up Space, making its regional premiere at Main Street Theater (MST), he’s self-righteously ripping through a series of emails from the headmaster at his rebellious daughter’s boarding school [...]
Sean Shim-Boyle: Salt House
Rarely does such a potentially disruptive, even violent architectural intervention feel as organic and sensitive as Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Sean Shim-Boyle’s response to one of the historic Holman Street shotgun houses in Project Row Houses’ Round 38. Reacting to [...]
Review: Roscoe Mitchell with Nameless Sound
On March 29th, Roscoe Mitchell’s Houston residency with Nameless Sound came to a joyous end at the Eldorado...
Mark Fox: If That Then This
Grids are nearly synonymous with the concept of order. Spreadsheets compartmentalize data into cells of information. Graph paper structures the organization of schemas and equations. Even if one does not deal in [...]
Robert Ruello: Open Other Side
Visiting Robert Ruello’s third solo exhibition at Inman Gallery, I was reminded of the term “abstract illusionism,” which critic Barbara Rose coined in the late 1960s to describe painters using trompe-l’oeuil devices to create spatial [...]
Review: Il trovatore
There are two sides to every story, but it’s easy to pick a favorite when the fight is between a sniveling Count and a fiery gypsy. Verdi’s ever-popular Il trovatore, Houston Grand Opera’s last production of the season, shows why revenge is something to savor. First performed in Rome in 1853, the music in this opera is structured very differently from Wagner’s [...]
Review: Falstaff
Send two identical love letters to two married women, and even a lovable scoundrel deserves to be dumped in the brook with the dirty laundry. There may be no honest, civil or sober men in Verdi’s Falstaff, but it makes for a hilarious opera, and Opera in the Heights’ production had the audience [...]
Loose Ends: May 2013
Stray Tidbits, Blind Items and Unsolicited Advice Last year’s salutary exhibition American Made: 250 Years of American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston played to the MFAH’s strengths, telling a convincing story [...]