Reviews for Different Stages Performances
Review: Arsenic and Old Lace by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 01, 2013
Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring is one of those whimsical comedies that just won't die. The playwright wins our sympathies with a pair of comforting maiden aunts, their capable journalist nephew Mortimer and a sweet parson's daughter. He then plays a series of clever modulations in madness -- from the harmless to the surprising to the pathological. The play and the Jimmy Stewart movie are familiar, so this review's not likely to spoil …
Review: The Children's Hour by Different Stages
by Catherine Dribb
Published on January 09, 2012
Zook’s character is strong and compelling. These dramatic performances were accented by the school children’s caricaturistic performances providing necessary comic relief against the evil of a conniving child’s web of lies
Having attended the performance with a friend who, while a fan of theater, nevertheless believes that scripts written after 1950 that don’t take into consideration the average attention span of adults will reduce their art to inconsiderate babbling, I became concerned when the greeter at the box office said, “The show runs over two hours but has two intermissions.” My pragmatic thespian friend, while relenting since The Children’s Hour was written in 1934 (before writers …
Review: The Children's Hour by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 09, 2012
There's a lot of Lillian Hellman herself in the determined and dangerous Mary Tilford. In part, The Children's Hour is the writer's savage revenge on conventional morality.
One must understand Lillilan Hellman's 1934 melodrama The Children's Hour as a vision seen through a glass, darkly. So much separates us from this play, its imagined world, and Hellman's provocative portrait of middle-class morality that we risk imposing on it our own twenty-first-century sensibilities. That's inevitable, but by becoming aware of our own mindsets, perhaps we can stretch them a bit. Two women friends have worked in collegial partnership for eight years to purchase …
Review: Well by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 18, 2011
Jennifer Underwood is that rare bird, the experienced actress who radiates such wisdom and warmth that she makes you long for a big hug, a cup of herbal tea and a long afternoon chat in the homey mess that's her living room.
This mischievous comedy deserves a better title. By calling it Well, Lisa Kron implies that it's about exactly the opposite: about illness. That subliminal message is reinforced in Different Stages' press releases. Even an impish twist of punctuation would have done it. Call it Well? so as to capture the mother-daughter dialogue at the heart of the play, in which monologist Lisa Kron pushes beyond the strictures of stand-up comedy and tale-telling, confiding to the …
Review: Too Many Husbands by Different Stages
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on June 27, 2011
Martina Ohlhauser breathes life into a potentially two-dimensional character. She is charming as she whines, enticing as she lies, and entertaining as she grandstands about her own constant self-sacrifice.
Too Many Laughs The program for Different Stages’ production of Too Many Husbands provides a page-long biography of the author, W. Somerset Maugham, best remembered today as a novelist. Here one may learn that Maugham worked as an obstetrician in the slums of London, joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver at the age of forty and went on to become a secret service agent for British Military Intelligence. This is perhaps to inject …
Review: Humble Boy by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 18, 2011
Playwright Jones creates vivid characters and director Jonathan Urso runs them through amusing clashes and quirky incidents, including a grimly funny series of missteps with the ashes of the late lamented James Humble.
Tom Stephan is a revelation in Different Stages' Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones, playing through the end of the month at the City Theatre. In Austin Shakespeare's production of The Tempest last September he was a dismayed and battered King Alonso of Naples, cast ashore in the opening scene and awkwardly penitent in Act V. Here, as Felix Humble, the title character of Jones' sardonic social comedy, Stephan is vividly alive, so inventive and subtle …