Recent Reviews
Review: A Chorus Line by Playhouse San Antonio
by Kurt Gardner
Published on May 11, 2016
A CHORUS LINE is over 40, but there's still a universal message to be gleaned here -- and the songs all hold up nicely.
Winner of nine Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, A Chorus Line is the ultimate tribute to those unheralded background performers who aren’t necessarily looking for Broadway stardom but are driven by the unquenchable need to perform. Even if some of the references may be starting to show their age (the show is over 40, after all), there’s still a universal message to be gleaned here — and the songs all hold up …
Review: The Lark by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 11, 2016
Anouilh admonishes that you cannot explain Joan, any more than you can explain the tiniest flower growing by the wayside.
With a decade of public performances of Elizabethan and early modern theatre behind them, the Baron's Men offer an adroit and subtle change of mode at the lakeside Elizabethan-style Curtain Theatre. The Lark is a costume drama, richly draped, and it's set in 1430, the period exactly contemporaneous with the settings of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays. It shares a principal character with them: Joan of Arc, the maid of Orleans who rose from peasant obscurity …
Review: Witchcraft in Their Lips by University of Texas (other)
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 09, 2016
These few, this band of sisters of 'Untamed Shakespeare,' have taken deep draughts of the pure source material and are celebrating Shakespeare with the fervor the Bacchae celebrated Dionysus.
A swift-moving though at times bewildering collection of scenes from Shakespeare's histories, Witchcraft in their Lips closets you with a dozen women reveling in scenes mined from eight of Shakespeare's eight history plays. Stephanie Donowho and Nell McKeown, not featured in that dozen, collected and arranged these excerpts in an effort to evaluate Shakespeare's female characters, depicted in plots of vigorous masculine struggle. While confirming that many of the plays, especially the histories, depict women …
Review: The Tempest - An Aerial Tale by Renaissance Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 07, 2016
Renaissance Austin’s Tempest with its largely mute Ariel and ranting Prospero doesn’t offer many pear-shaped tones but makes up for that with spectacle and surprise.
It helps to know Shakespeare’s plot before you attend the Renaissance Austin/Sky Candy production of The Tempest. Lorella Loftus’s adaptation cuts a lot of text to reduce playing time to just over two hours including a 15-minute intermission. Aerial gymnastics on silks, rings and trapezes take a lot of stage time and don't necessarily advance the story. She also makes significant modifications. As a framing device an aged Prospero meditates in his library before and …
Review: Born Yesterday by Classic Theatre of San Antonio
by Kurt Gardner
Published on May 03, 2016
In this time capsule Hayley Burnside delivers a convincing transition from a gum-snapping, happy-go-lucky chorus girl to a deep thinker who’s growing a conscience.
A crowd-pleasing hit when it opened on Broadway in 1946, Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday now plays like an interesting time capsule of the attitudes and mores of the postwar era. That said, the production now playing at San Antonio’s Classic Theatre has been so well-cast — and is performed so engagingly — that it breathes new life into the occasionally heavy-handed piece. Corrupt junk dealer Harry Block (Greg Hinojosa) arrives in Washington with his mistress, …
Review: Good People by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 28, 2016
Nina Bryant's Margie the scrappy little Boston Southie mutt is sharp edges and soft center, a woman hiding psychological bruises behind dogged let's-get-through-this-one-day optimism..
I rarely stand to applaud at curtain calls, but even a theatre reviewer's scrupulous neutrality can be overwhelmed. Last Saturday when Nina Bryant who plays the protagonist of Good People stepped out to cap the actors' acknowledgements, I surged to my feet. Her creation of Margie the scrappy little Southie mutt of an abandoned wife was sharp edges and soft center, a woman hiding psychological bruises behind dogged let's-get-through-this-one-day optimism. You are sitting in the …