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

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya face pre-marriage jitters in The Drama

Photo courtesy of A24

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama.

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya will be seen together a lot at the movies in 2026, with mega-films like The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three coming out later in the year. But fans can get a much more intimate look at the two stars in a film that offers a unique take on relationship struggles, The Drama.

Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) are a New York couple who are engaged to be married. After a quick-but-effective montage of their courtship, the story joins them as they are just days away from their wedding. As they get all the details like music, flowers, and food finalized, a visit to the caterer with married friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) proves fateful.

A few too many drinks leads to each member of the group deciding to divulge the worst thing they’ve ever done. While each story is slightly shocking, Emma’s takes the cake, so much so that Charlie starts to question their relationship. As they get closer to the wedding date, Charlie finds it increasingly difficult to get beyond Emma’s revelation, with each real or imagined conversation threatening to derail their previously tight bond.

Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, the film is provocative, funny, and cringey as it tries to get to the center of human dynamics. Charlie, Rachel, and Mike have starkly different reactions to Emma’s story, and the way those play out over the course of the film provides, well, the drama. The harder Charlie tries to justify Emma’s past, the more his underlying feelings start to eat at him, causing friction not just between him and Emma, but in other parts of his life, as well.

Strangely, especially for a character played by Zendaya, Emma recedes more than expected. Her explanations for her previous actions are timid at best, and she mostly seems to be waiting for Charlie to forgive her instead of questioning why she needs forgiveness. Borgli favors the male side of the equation, and in so doing he doesn’t dig as deep into the root of the issue as he could have.

Still, the downward spiral at the center of the story has a propulsive nature to it, and each successive step proves to be both hard to watch and impossible to turn away from. It also helps that Borgli manages the tone well, keeping interactions between characters relatively light so that the film doesn’t turn into one like Marriage Story.

Pattinson, who gets to use his own British accent for once, put on an interesting performance that is much better than his last two roles in Mickey 17 and Die My Love. He has good chemistry with Zendaya, who manages to shine despite being laden with a role that doesn’t play entirely to her strengths. Haim and Athie do good work in small roles, while Hailey Grace and Hannah Gross make an impact in brief appearances.

The situation in which Emma and Charlie find themselves in The Drama is not one to be wished on anyone, but it’s presented well by Borgli, keeping tensions high for the bulk of the film. Despite the two main characters not given completely equal footing, the story finds a way to get to a satisfactory ending.

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The Drama opens in theaters on April 3.

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