I grew up in Houston and performed professionally there for about ten years with numerous theatre companies, but I moved to Chicago 15 years ago and have been out of the Houston theatre loop in that time. I still have a lot of friends performing there (even Everett Evans is a dear friend of mine). I don't know what Paul Hope has been doing in the last 15 years, but in the 90s, it was difficult to attend a TUTS production and NOT see Paul (we also went to the same gym back then). Thank God TUTS has the Sarofim now. The Music Hall was such a dreary old barn. And the Arena (of which Paul Hope was one of the original investors) was a hideous theater-in-the-round that was an 80s novelty that was far too large for any production to be effective. Unfortunately, Houston remains being a size queen with Jones Hal, Sarofim and the Brown (Wortham) being too large to be enjoyed by the majority of the audience for plays and musicals.
While I believe Houston to be vastly underrated in the general sense by much of the country, the city does make really bone-headed decisions with regards to tourism, sports and the arts. The city will never live up to its potential until it invests in a practical and usable mass transit system (an elevated rail system similar to Chicago would be ideal) rather than constantly expanding its freeways, which only adds to its traffic problems rather than the reverse. The feeble attempt to increase tourism by adding that "aquarium" and ferris wheel downtown as well as the little light rail (glorified buses, really) is rather embarrassing. I do like the improvements to Main Street and the Theatre District, however.
"What can you expect from a bunch of seitan worshippers?" - Reginald Tresilian
. I also sit much further away in the Sarofim than in either the Hubbard or Neuhaus at the Alley. 
