Imagine this : An American Puccini wins a Guggenheim grant and writes an epic American musical score based on Western civilization’s most catalytic Greek myth with a wunderkind “Jules Verne” lyricist in the early 1950’s…. and you have The Golden Apple: exhilarating, stately, saucy, poignant, immersive, seductive, demanding amazing depth, scope and stamina from its … Continue reading
Posted in October 2014 …
Back to the Garden: “Flower in the Machine” @ THE OCHRE HOUSE
Creation is the Buzzword at Matt Posey’s The Ochre House, where collaborator artist Kevin Grammer’s original play Flower In The Machine surprises the audience with a tender, budding love fable that emerges from a grim, robotic, computer-dominated desolation drama. Simple language and sympathetic, intriguing characters ricochet off of a drab, ultra-compartmentalized Orwellian existence. Hope flourishes! … Continue reading
The Gods Must Be Sandy: TEOTL at Cara Mia/Prism Co.
Who or what is a teotl? I’m not versed in Aztec myth. Wikipedia, that shaky source of sometimes-correct information, defines it as a “Nahuatl term, a central idea of Aztec religion, often translated as “god”, maybe possessing “more abstract aspects of the numinous or divine.” And who or what are Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca? Going back … Continue reading
Bite Down: “The Golden Apple” at Lyric Stage
1950’s Broadway audiences backed away from The Golden Apple. It was all Greek, all intimidating Classical Greek, to them, they reasoned, even if it was sung in English. It didn’t follow the era’s conventional format for successful musical theatre. Never mind that the critics praised it highly with almost unanimous voice. Never mind that it … Continue reading
WHY THINGS BURN: Trick or Treat with Van Quattro
Performance Art with a Fright Night Deadline! Most of you folks in the North Texas theatre community recognize Van Quattro as the world-weary donut shop owner who stole the show in Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts at Theatre Three in 2012 or as the grim psycho with a freaky hand fetish in Second Thought Theatre’s A … Continue reading
Those Guvmint Office Blues: FunHouse Theatre and Film’s “Mortgage”
Don’t let the grim title scare you away. Mortgage. The creative folks at Fun House Theatre and Film likes to come up with catchy one-word titles (like Stiff earlier this year) so they’re easy to remember. The titles don’t always have a lot to do with the shows, themselves. As in this one, running through … Continue reading
Oklahoma City Rep’s “Grapes of Wrath”: classic stage tribute to its 75th year
“A different time is coming.” Folks moved on if they wanted to survive. Beginning in 1930, the Great Plains region entered an era of extreme drought, which combined with widespread unsustainable farming practices to create a massively destructive, widespread dust storm phenomenon designated “The Dust Bowl”. By the end of the 1930’s, more than 75% … Continue reading
criticalrant.com Alexandra Bonifield 