Fun Home is Bleak House
When you are told early on in a musical that the lead male character Bruce, the father of the family being portrayed, is going to commit suicide, you know it’s…
Old-Style English Musical in Austin
Rupert Holmes, who created the musical Mystery of Edwin Drood, is on record as hoping, and thinking, that Charles Dickens would have enjoyed his creation. Based as it is on…
Brahms’ Mountainous Concerto
“It is a long and massive piano concerto. Just making it to the end of the first movement is like making it to base camp.” Pianist Orli Shaham was likening…
Love Never Dies
What happens when your sky-high expectations for the title song of a musical fall flat when the big moment comes and the singer can’t deliver or the lyrics just don’t…
A Musical Christmas Carol
There is nothing better than a ghost for Halloween, except maybe a ghost for Christmas. At the Zach Theatre now you can see not one but four ghosts on stage…
DOUBT
Doubt is as old as civilisation. As author Jennifer Hecht has written, “the birth of philosophy is one of the origins of doubt.” As an inescapable element of thought, it…
Presidential History in Northern Texas
While the Austin area is LBJ country, the first Texas-born president of the United States hailed from the far north. I recently visited Denison, 270 miles north of Austin, to…
The Full Monty: Terrence McNally at 80
“A play isn’t finished until the last character enters.” So said Terrence McNally at his 80th birthday celebration, held at Austin’s Zach Theatre on Nov. 12. The ‘last character’ he…
Otello: Lessons for Our Time
The lasting legacy of Shakespeare resides in part on his relevance to more modern times. Even though his plays deal with events hundreds of years ago, each succeeding generation finds…
Jerry Brown: It’s a Dangerous Time
California Governor Jerry Brown, during a visit to Austin, issued a dire warning for the near future. “The population is segmenting: we’re going from unum to plurality. It’s a dangerous…