Reviews for University of Texas Theatre & Dance Performances
Review: The Threepenny Opera by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 24, 2011
Most memorable of all in an evening that thrashes and enchants its audience is the near-finale of Schnack's "Call from the Grave," as Mack stands with the noose about his neck, contemptuous and berating, with the chilling refrain, "If you forgive me, I will forgive you."
UT's The Threepenny Opera was an astonishing production, of such quality and depth that it deserved to run for months. But the Oscar Brockett Theatre seats only about 200 and there were only seven performances. I organized a group of 16 to attend the first Saturday performance, and they walked away bedazzled. You can pity that one prospective group member who decided not to take up the offer because, he said, he's "allergic to opera." …
Review: Our Town by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 08, 2010
I didn't perceive that inner shift -- the gathering calm of resignation and understanding. As my silver-haired wife commented afteward, "But they're all young. How could they understand that yet?"
Stage Manager: I've married over two hundred couples in my day. . . . M . . . marries N . . . . millions of them. The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday afternoon drives in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will -- Once in a thousand times it's interesting. [He now looks at the audience for the first time, with a warm smile …
Review: Pride and Prejudice by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 17, 2009
This Pride and Prejudice has elegance in speech, in dress, in ceremony and in setting. You'll find no surprises in the story line and no distortions or intrusive modifications.
Pride and Prejudice at UT's B. Iden Payne Theatre is a beautiful, graceful production. This is a musical text, and not only because of the jigs and reels at the balls sponsored by cheerful Mr. Bingley. Jane Austen's familiar novel about impoverished young ladies and their ultimately successful romances is written largely in dialogue, with cadence, understatement, wit, parry and riposte, quite as if it were a verbal score. No wonder it has been so successfully …
Review: The Trojan Women by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 03, 2009
When Verity Branco comes on as Helen of Troy, my God, we have got Jessica Rabbit in the flesh -- slinky black dress split to the hip, high heels, and scarlet elbow-length gloves.
I have puzzled and puzzled about this production. Meghan Kennedy and Kimber Lee preserve the approximate shape of Euripides' great tragedy. Their text rarely echoes his lines directly, but it includes scenes of sharp, cadenced prose or blank verse that evoke the terror and hopelessness of brutally widowed women left in tattered clothing, dirt and desperation. In particular, Kate DeBuys as Hecuba is magnificent. She projects a stunned concentration in which only the steel of her …
Review: The Idiot by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 06, 2009
The playwright's work is made easier by the luminiscent acting of Tom Truss as Myshkin. Truss shows us a man who is simple yet exceedingly complex -- a man whose emotions war openly in his face.
Scott Kanoff's transformation of Dostoyevski's novel gives us a luminous experience, a comedy of manners of the 19th century Russian aristocracy tracked and threatened by deep and pernicious evil.The Thursday night performance was sold out. The largely undergraduate audience around the wide thrust space of the Brockett Theatre fastened on every word throughout, even though the piece runs a full three hours, including its 15-minute intermission.Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin is returning to Moscow from Switzerland, where …
Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream by University of Texas
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 20, 2008
Oh, Dad! Get a grip. Your Hermia is in love with Lysander, and your insistence is going to drive them both to elope, at night, via the enchanted forest where all those fairies hang out!
UT calls the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre an "intimate space." They are speaking Texas institutional intimacy here -- only 200 seats, arrayed about three sides of a huge square playing space under 40-foot ceiling rigged with lights, catwalks, hoists and other machinery. And with a built-in audience from those 50,000 UT students and 16,500 faculty and staff.When I arrived, all but breathless, 15 minutes before curtain time, I had to stand in a line of …