White Christmas
For those who harken back to a kinder and gentler time, there is no better tonic that the musical White Christmas, currently on stage at The Palace in Georgetown. For…
Sorry! Wrong Chimney
As political analyst Steve Schmidt said on TV recently, “You can’t solve crazy, and you can’t solve stupid.” If it appears the entire cast of characters in Sorry! Wrong Chimney…
Santaland Diaries
Santa’s little elf isn’t so little. In the Santaland Diaries, being performed now at the Zach Theatre, he is a full-grown man with a saucy tongue and a rapier wit.…
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…