Justin's Theatre Reviews

  It can be very nerve wracking to work with iconic material, especially when adapting for the stage. You want the material to stand out on its own, but you also don't want to stray too far away from your source material because some adaptations tend to go downhill when you do. The musical version of Sister Act (based on the 1992 film which starred Whoopi Goldberg) does a very nice job of working with its source material, but with the wrong cast, things might not go well . Luckily enough for the UTEP Dinner Theatre's production, everything fell into place. The cast was perfect, the direction was perfect, the sets looked great, the costumes were fabulous, and the end result was AWESOME. Sister Act was easily one of the best shows I have seen at the UTEP Dinner Theatre. With all of these things in place, the show was an absolute blast and if I hadn't attended the production's final performance, I very easily would have gone again.   Sister Act tells the story of a ni

    This year in El Paso, two productions of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods were put on by two local theatre companies. The first of which was El Paso Community College's Production which, as you know if you are a regular reader of my blog, was a mess . The second production was done by Sun City Musical Theatre....The huge difference between the two productions was that while the EPCC production was a conceivable mess, the Sun City Musical Theatre production was such a mess, that it was actually unbelievable. Sun City's production of Into the Woods is a flop of Carrie sized proportions. This production of "Into the Woods" was outrageous and downright ridiculous. Even the chicken who ran out onstage in the EPCC production was taken aback by how truly bad this production was. It's not even that the talent wasn't there, it was, but there were so many obvious setbacks and wrong choices made in this production that made it the mess of a sh