Reviews for Zach Theatre Performances
Review: White Christmas by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 20, 2012
So here's your choice: the Zach Theatre production as Christmas comfort food, done with energy and not a trace of irony (yes, there are snowflakes swirling down for the finale) or the 1954 movie. By the way, the film was done in Technicolor. And it has Bing Crosby and Donald O'Connor.
The Zach Theatre throws everything it's got at White Christmas, and it shows. Nick Demos' inventive choreography is on display; Allen Robertson conducts a vigorous nine-piece orchestra tucked out of sight beneath the stage; invited stars Matthew Redden and Matt Gibson make a plausible buddy team, even though they don't much resemble Bing and Donald. Our Meredith McCall is there as the older, wiser and more angular of the hoofin' Haynes Sisters nightclub act, and …
Review: The Santaland Diaries by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 18, 2012
Sedaris' text is smug and sarcastic, an appropriate antidote to all the sugar swirlilng around at this time of year, but Martin Burke himself is the reason to go see the supposed sayanora performances.
Zach Theatre Artistic Director Dave Steakley says that this is the last time -- for a while -- they'll stage David Sedaris' The Santaland Diaries. This is the 15th (!) season they've done it, so perhaps it's time, but if like me you had abstained from attending this holiday ritual, it's time to swing on board before the caboose gets out of reach. The program states that Martin Burke has been doing his role as …
Review: Ragtime by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 30, 2012
Ragtime is a big production for a big new theatre, one that says, loud and proud, that 'Austin's theatre' offers a level of artistic and technical excellence as good as any in the country.
The Zach's Ragtime is a huge -- I mean HUGE -- and lavish production, inaugurating its state-of-the-art 425-seat Topfer theatre. The flair, finish and finesse of this production are simply breath-taking. Ragtime is a fable of a faraway America, one that existed at the very opening of the twentieth century. In his 1975 novel E.L. Doctorow imagined a tangled story involving a prosperous bourgeois family in New Rochelle, an unmarried African-American couple and their child, …
Review: Dividing the Estate by Zach Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 04, 2012
Eugene Lee's monologue is at once a distilled narrative, sermon and symbol; and it is decidedly Faulknerian. Its meanings are layered on at several levels, all in relatively few words.
The Zach Theatre is a great showcase for local and regional art and talent, claiming as it does all the advantages of location, etc. It seems to hold court over Lady Bird Lake, with hill country scenery upstream and the shining, multi-colored towers of Austin across the lake. I visited Zach to see Dividing the Estate, Horton Foote’s 1989 play about a Texas family falling apart over estate inheritance. To cut to the chase, the …
Review: The Laramie Project Ten Years Later by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 02, 2012
This second Laramie play is less effective because in face of the forgetting, the writer/investigator/players are necessarily presented as driven by a thesis. It's a thesis with which I agree as patently do those who attend this production.
You know these people; you're comfortable with them. Most likely because you attended their portrayal in March and April of The Laramie Project, but possibly also because you recognize them as the Zach regulars who have appeared before you so many times. The Laramie Project 10 Years Later has the reassuring buzz of a class reunion, which is something like the way it must have been for the Tectonic Theatre Project as they undertook the …
Review: Next to Normal by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 07, 2012
Zach's staging of the Tom Kitt/Brian Yorkey work Next to Normal is stunning -- but not in the usual reviewer-speak meaning of the word.
Zach's staging of the Tom Kitt/Brian Yorkey work Next to Normal is stunning -- but not in the usual reviewer-speak meaning of the word. The intensity of the emotion, the huge volume of sound, the zig-zag of florescent lighting on the back walls of the set and above all the pitiless focus upon the mental illness of a suburban wife and mother -- all of these foster a numbness of mind that leaves you feeling …