Brett Cullum - Page 7

When you think of summer, you think of food, but rarely do you immediately think of thespians and theater. But why is that? Theaters are cool and dark, and they often seem like great places to escape the heat.

Truly, these shows are ingenious musical sketch-comedy pieces that remind me a ton of both Carol Brunette and variety shows of the 70s as much as something like a South Park, The Simpsons, or Family Guy. They are a chance to watch “serious actors” let go and do really silly fun stuff that they almost never get to do in any other play, unleashed by any other company.

Inside My Walls is a rare chance to see why dance is so magical. The intimacy of the Asia Society’s theater allows you to see every extension, and often hear even the breaths that these performers take. If you have not witnessed this company, this weekend is your chance.

This show is a Houston summer tradition, and it is the Catastrophic Theatre's version of A Christmas Carol at the Alley or The Nutcracker at the Houston Ballet. Except every year, this one's a new script and a new ball of crazy to enjoy.

LET.HER.RIP. is the show to see this summer! It will be one we will refer back to again and again. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly, and the Matchstick Women would be proud.

I've known about Maggie and this play for four years. In fact, when I was at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, the Director of Play Development, I chose this play for one of our development processes. So I was part of this play's development. There have been subsequent workshops, and I didn't know this at the time, but Maggie was inspired to write this play because of Breonna Taylor.

I thought there must be a way to create really beautiful, high-level productions that people understand and walk away with meaning.

Grammy Award-winning soprano Ana María Martínez, with Broadway music director and conductor Andy Einhorn, will be at The Hobby Center this Saturday at 7:30 pm in the Zilkha Hall.

It’s a quick hour-and-twenty-minute script that became the basis for a sitcom, and guess what? It pretty much feels like watching a taping of a television comedy. It’s light, fluffy, and fun. It’s like summer ice cream, and this one will be a natural audience pleaser to round out this company’s season.

Boiling Point Players are joining forces to recreate this reimagining of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—set not in ancient Rome, but behind the bars of Rome Correctional Facility, a women’s maximum-security prison where power is currency and betrayal is a daily threat.

This is a revival for Theatre Under the Stars, who first presented IN THE HEIGHTS in 2016. It replaced GREASE as their season opener way back then, which marked an inevitable transition in the company’s artistic direction and commitment to the evolution of musical theater.

They have managed to restage BUG for 2025, and boy, is it a doozy! You don’t want to miss this revival and reimagining of the Tracy Letts cult classic. The entire company goes for broke, and they create a fiery display of acting, visuals, and audio landscapes that will blow you back in your chair.

In the Heights follows three days in the life of a community in Washington Heights. We get to see several different stories and vignettes that are happening throughout the show. It's this community that's having to deal with instant change.

So I think, first and foremost, Bug, believe it or not, is a love story. Without loneliness and without loss and without vulnerability, we don't get to the place that we need to be, where this crater of ache exists inside Agnes, which opens her up to Peter. Which really is the beginning of the infestation.

A lot of people ask, “Why do you think it won the Pulitzer?” Post pandemic, and with all of the social media stuff that we have going on. There's something so simple that she was able to capture again, how we need each other, and it goes so against what society tells us.

And what of Wesley Whitson as Hamlet, perhaps the most challenging role in the entire canon of Shakespeare’s works? He is age-appropriate and fiercely dives into the madness for the first two-thirds, and then becomes steely and predatory for the final acts.