Recent Reviews
Review: 4000 Miles by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 16, 2016
Our attention is held by the exposition of the protagonists old and young, but Herzog's work is essentially a Bildungsroman that runs a jumpy young Leo through life lessons, particularly concerning the opposite sex.
Amy Herog's 4000 Miles starts off pretty clunky and she deliberately withholds important chunks of background. It's 3 a.m and we're in a rent-controlled apartment in lower Manhattan, assuming that such accomodations still exist. Leo has just turned up in full biking gear and roused his grandmother Vera, evidently because he has nowhere else to go. In opening scenes the story is doled out: Leo's been incommunicado on a cross-country bike trip that started in …
Review: Marie Antoinette by Capital T Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on March 11, 2016
Playwright Adjmi examines history's great irony: the fact that revolutionary France tried to build on rationality to fulfill human potential, but its only dynamic was the raving irrationality of the murderous mob.
Marie Antoinette by David Adjmi presents the events of the title character's life with historical accuracy. The play is not what anyone would call a historical play, however. It is a biographical work focusing on almost exclusively for the French queen's death, not on her life. Capital T Theatre’s extremely well-designed and performed production at the Off-Center treats Adjmi’s play well and brings some literary justice to Marie Antoinette. The show provides an intense, unwavering …
Review: Marie Antoinette by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 09, 2016
Marie sails with instructed indifference even through horrors, and the circumstances of her death remain opaque and unexplained to her.
Aristotle wouldn't have liked it. His rules for tragedy in Poetics, the earliest surviving work of literary theory, insist that the protagonist of a tragedy should be a great or heroic individual, and misfortune should result from a mistake or misjudgement of the protagonist. And don't forget hubris -- the canny old fellow liked to point the finger at overweening pride as preparing the way for a fall. David Adjmi isn't headed that way. Indigo …
Review: A Man for All Seasons by City Theatre Company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on March 05, 2016
When Norfolk tries to understand Thomas More's stance, he's thwarted by the simple line, "I trust I have made myself obscure." Yet the truth couldn't be farther from this gibe.
A Season for a Fall It’s good to be king, as the saying goes, you have absolute power and most of your desires are readily fulfilled. Everyone loves you, or at least they pretend to. . . ahhh, there's the rub. The pandering sycophants and your truest friends are forced by fear of the executioner’s axe to be pretty much one and the same. An honest opinion is hard to find. This is why King …
Review: Art/Model Show: Subject by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 04, 2016
This session was anything but static. I slipped away into the cool Austin evening with the strong feeling that I had been somehow embraced.
I slipped away into the cool Austin evening after Art Model Show: Subject with the strong feeling that I had been somehow embraced. The performance wasn't lengthy. For just over an hour the spectators -- no, call us paying guests -- had sat quietly in the studio, clutching sketchbooks and pencils while taking in the huddle of six artists working at their easels and the five undraped figure models positioned variously on platforms before them. …
Review: Twelfth Night by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 04, 2016
The clever vigor of UT's undergraduate actors in a design evoking magic and transformation provides an entirely satisfying Twelfth Night for devotees and newbies alike.
Traffic was at a near standstill at the University of Texas campus in Austin last Saturday half an hour before the opening of Twelfth Night. I had to take a circuitous route, commit myself to a long line ol cars waiting to enter the parking garage near Longhorns Stadium and fork over a $10 'event parking' fee. But not because of the production at the 244-seat Oscar Brockett Theatre at the UT Department of Theatre …