Recent Reviews
Review: The Realistic Joneses by Hyde Park Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 27, 2016
Incongruities, socially unacceptable outbursts, surprising changes and confessions -- Eno's baffling characters show courage, stoic or reluctant, in facing adversities of shared existence.
Will Eno writes funny characters. And they're not funny ha-ha; they're funny strange. Disconnected. Earnest, inept and trapped in cold joyless individual worlds that bounce off one another as if they're walking around inside invisible force fields. I was baffled when Ken Webster and Hyde Park Theatre regulars presented Eno's Tragedy: A Tragedy in 2013, and it's just as well that I had another CTXLiveTheatre reviewer to cover it. I told myself then that the …
Review: As You Like It by Shrewd Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 24, 2016
The Shrewds' ingenious AS YOU LIKE IT does the piece proud -- it's an enchantment to be cherished.
This is a land of dreams, enchanted and enchanting. As You Like It is always fun, and this production is something special. Director Lily Wolff draws into this magic circle both familiar Austin devotees of Shakespeare performance and attractive newcomers. And the Shrewd company is just that: knowledgeable, confident, plausible and entirely winning. Set initially in the court of an irascible and usurping duke, it's a quick-moving tale of women friends' escape to the forest …
Review: The Mikado Reclaimed by Generic Ensemble Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2016
They're not going to ask you if you liked the show. Anyone who likes what they see portrayed here is a dark and twisted soul.
At the talk-back following the performance they're not going to ask you if you liked the show. Anyone who likes what they see portrayed here is a dark and twisted soul. The co-director of the Vortex Repertory asks you to volunteer a word or phrase expressing your reaction to the relentlessly grim world of captivity and exploitation of Asian women, a Muslim woman and an Asian man who may be gay. That dark crude barracks, …
Review: The Government Inspector by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 18, 2016
All the town's characters are stereotypes of self-importance, ripe for deflating. In the busy and buoyant action Gogol, Hatcher and director Polgar puncture them deftly and often.
Nikolai Gogol was only 25 when The Government Inspector was presented and published, and he'd already made a reputation for himself as a writer of short stories and the historical romance Taras Bulba, set in the Cossack region of his origins. Gogol had also proved an ignorant disaster when appointed professor of medieval history at the University of St. Petersburg. A romantic fleeing from his modest origins among the petty nobility of the Ukraine, he'd …
Review: Fixing Timon of Athens by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2016
Kirk Lynn takes this sow's ear and turns it into a silk purse, well constructed, hand sewn, brightly spangled and furnished with language of 21st-century pungency.
In casting about for Shakespeare plays to mend with his own distinctive language and imagining, Kirk Lynn did well to choose Timon of Athens. It was published in the First Folio of 1623 and not much seems to be known about its history. Timon has the full five acts characteristic of Shakespearian and Elizabethan drama, but they're an awkward and uneasy assembly. It's easy to suppose that this piece, appearing seven years after Shakespeare's death, …
Review: The Seagull by Classic Theatre of San Antonio
by Kurt Gardner
Published on February 15, 2016
Director Allan S. Ross works with a fine ensemble cast to bring Chekhov’s prose to life, and the results are superb.
The characters in Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull should be familiar to theatergoers, even those who haven’t seen the actual play itself. Among other works, Christopher Durang’s 2012 comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (presented by the Classic Theatre last year) incorporates themes from Chekhov’s play, and Donald Margulies’s 2014 comedy The Country House also riffs on the piece. So how does a straight-on presentation of this century-old play hold up for …