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You'll be hard-pressed to find a riskier production in Austin this year than this strange string of ballads and mysteries

Director Ken Webster has made a career out of discovering quirky, funny scripts by young playwrights that entertain as they offer insight into our culture, and that describes Rebecca Gilman's Blue Surge perfectly

Three highly amusing and personable comic actors skewer, pun, and cook their way through all 37 of Shakespeare's plays in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), a show that launches the Austin Shakespeare Festival's 20th anniversary season with a bang, a few whacks, and a lot of laughs.

You may love musicals, and you may love ABBA, but Mamma Mia, the hit musical that features dozens of hits by the Swedish pop band, is so treacly and so utterly invasive in its attempts to win over its audience that you may feel like you've been violated with a candy cane.

As presented by da da kamera at the Fresh Terrain performance festival, Daniel MacIvor's In On It provided a beautiful and quirky evocation of chance, choice, love, and life's inevitable drift (or plummet) toward death.

Tapestry Dance Company's new paean to our fair city, Austintatious, made clear this company's innovative spirit and amalgamation of serious talent; we're lucky this sterling organization calls Austin home.

Pro Arts Collective's presentation of two Pearl Cleage one-act plays delivered this playwright's poetic, often witty dialogue with style and some convincing performances; the only thing missing from this quality production was the audience.

For years, the city of Austin's arts funding process has been mired in perpetual gloom, but with the city reviewing its Cultural Contracts Program, artists and arts companies talking with each other about collaborations and a shared vision of what the arts mean to Austin, there are glimmers of light on the city's arts funding horizon.

Austin Musical Theatre's production of My Fair Lady serves up the tale of a Cockney flower girl's transformation at the hands of an egotistical phonetics professor with a lavish look and a playful spirit, creating a delightful dance of elegance and frivolity.

Second Youth Family Theatre's season opener is a perky and enjoyable sampler of the works of Samuel Clemens, better known to readers of literature and fence painters the world over as Mark Twain.

Director Dave Steakley and three outstanding Austin actors make a visit to The Pavilion, Craig Wright's bittersweet drama about two old flames who meet again at a high school reunion and ponder time's ability to widen chasms as well as heal wounds, time well spent.

The thrill that comes from the bright, full, flashy, splashy sound of a brass band is the feeling you get from Austin Musical Theatre's production of Sweet Charity and to coin a phrase, how sweet it is.

The Salvage Vanguard Theater production of Caridad Svich's Fugitive Pieces is a nowhere road reminiscent of the Tom Waits milieu, with vagabonds hopping trains to anywhere other than where they are now. But while it's not for everyone, it's worth the journey.

Onstage Theatre Company's production of The Gin Game manages to do justice to D.L. Coburn's 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, taking two people who sit around playing cards and holding our attention for the better part of two hours.

Like those Christmastime baskets full of cheese logs, summer sausages, miniature jars of jellies, etc., The Best Salvage Vanguard Holiday Ever features a diverse little gathering of tasty treats -- in this case, five-minute plays on a common theme -- and it's fun to snack on.

In its production of The Sound of Music, Austin Musical Theatre delivers Rodgers & Hammerstein's familiar songs with an ear for not just their beguiling tunefulness but their dramatic impact, so that the redemptive power of music makes itself heard again and again and again.

With Mr. 80 Percent, director Blake Yelavich and crew do their damnedest to entertain their audience, serving up James Sherman's loopy comedy of romance among roomies in a New York apartment with a lively energy that's winning even when the show works it a tad too hard in the "love me" department.

Zachary Scott Theatre Center's Little Shop of Horrors is a terrific staging of an endearingly weird musical.

Despite the presence of a talented ensemble, the Austin Shakespeare Festival production of what most of the English-speaking world considers the greatest play ever written is a thin Hamlet of watered-down performances and even more diluted directorial choices.

Zachary Scott Theatre Center's musical production of Jelly's Last Jam doesn't quite get at the soul of Jelly Roll Morton's complicated legacy.

Welcome the Bedlam Faction, the latest theatre company to be founded by veterans of UT Austin's Shakespeare at Winedale program, and its inaugural effort, Ben Jonson's Volpone, a tale of greed, conniving, status, and, ultimately, morality that Bedlam stages with a seeming insanity that befits its name but which is really quite smart, energetic, creative, and hilarious.

Austin Musical Theatre's Oklahoma! pulses with a rousing liveliness that makes it delightfully fresh, a territory that a joy to visit.

The title characters in Sarah Daniels' play Gut Girls are brash, foul-mouthed, beer-swilling cockneys, carving their lots from life at the slaughterhouse, and the UT Department of Theatre & Dance production's colorful design work, solid direction, and vivid performances put us inside their greasy, tough world.

The performers in Austin Musical Theatre’s revival of A Chorus Line dance and sing and act, well, like they have been doing this on Broadway stages all their careers. But poor tech and dated writing make this once-groundbreaking musical appear to be languishing in its former glory.

In its new staging of Samuel Beckett's signature play Waiting for Godot, the Gate Theatre Company of Dublin has succeeded in creating a definitive production of a major theatrical work.

Sample the Austin theatre scene in tasty 10-minute bites via the new Austin Script Works' compilation Speaking in Tongues.

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