From staging ground to fantasyland

Jousting with wildfires: Despite several close calls, the Texas RenaissanceFestival will battle on

The Festival Joust
Wildfires earlier this month missed festival ground by a mile and a half
Mildred Johnson as Sybil Hornbeak, along with some giant puppets.
Valt
The Ded Bob show, always a crowd favorite.
Steven David
Don't miss the Oktoberfest celebration this coming opening weekend on Oct. 8-9.
Steven David

Just spared by the massive wildfires in Grimes and Montgomery Counties, the Texas Renaissance Festival still plans to kick off its 37th season on Oct. 8 as scheduled.

The festival grounds in Plantersville — an hour north of Houston — were closed the weekend of Sept. 10 due to evacuation orders, suspending one of the festival’s eight late-summer rehearsals in addition to a staff orientation. That weekend, emergency crews used to the grounds as a staging area for fires only a mile and a half away.

“We were very lucky this year,” Gina Rotolo, the annual festival’s director of marketing and media, tells CultureMap. “In addition to the September event, a wildfire three miles away just missed us this past June. It’s been a stressful summer.”

The festival is making some concessions to the fires and drought conditions — replacing the traditional Royal Fireworks show with a laser show. Fires in the camping areas are also banned, with only propane cooking devices allowed. No roasting marshmallows over open flames.

Under new management since 2010, the festival broke attendance records last season, drawing more than 450,000 people over eight weekends to make it the largest Renaissance-themed fair in the nation.

“We were very lucky this year,” Gina Rotolo, the festival’s director of marketing, tells CultureMap. “In addition to the September event, a wildfire three miles away just missed us this past June. It’s been a stressful summer.”

Rotolo says there will be extensive improvements this year as the festival expands from 53 to 60 acres, including a new stage in the German area and alterations to a small chapel. In preparation for the large crowds, festival organizers also increased camping acreage. Organizers invited more than 30 new merchants this year for a total of nearly 400 “shoppes” — bringing about major renovations to the vendor area.

“Hey, even a 16th-century market needs to be up to building code,” Rotolo laughs.

“Amazingly, nothing was damaged by the fires,” festival entertainer Mildred Johnson says. “Right now, we’re just excited to be out there and work together again. We’re like a big family of barbarians, pirates, peasants, puppets, elves, fairies, and more recently — Transylvanians.”

Johnson has cultivated her Sybil Hornbeak persona for more than three years as both a cast member as well as a “boothie,” an affectionate name for the off-stage performers supplementing the merchant booths with colorful characters in full period garb. This year, she’ll be working at a handcrafted wooden toy shop named Visions in Wood.

“Sybil’s anywhere from an upper-class peasant to a lower-class merchant,” Johnson explains. “She was orphaned and raised in the forest by her adopted mother, Nanny Gruntswallow, who taught her a trade to be an independent woman.” That trade was candy-making, Johnson later revealed.

“Sybil’s husband, Baldric, is lost,” she continues, getting a little caught up in character. “Now, he didn’t leave her. He just hasn’t been seen since Sybil started dabbling in magic. He’s easy to spot, though, if you see him. He’s a balding man with three teeth and enormous nose — quite handsome really.”

With more than 500 performers, the Texas Renaissance Festival prides itself on maintaining the highest standards of authenticity, training its staff to maintain consistent accents as well as historically accurate costuming.

“We take great steps to make visitors to feel transported to another time and place,” Gina Rotolo says. “You wouldn’t want to see Mickey Mouse on a cell phone, right?”

The Texas Renaissance Festival is held Saturdays and Sundays for eight weekends starting Oct. 8 and on Thanksgiving Friday. Located 50 miles northwest of Houston on FM 1774 between Magnolia and Plantersville, visitors can watch performances on 17 stages and enjoy hundreds of international food purveyors and unique artisans — not to mention human-powered rides. See the festival website for more details.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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