Recent Reviews
Tonight’s Gonna be a Good Night: A Review of Zach Theatre’s A Christmas Carol, 2015
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on December 03, 2015
In a cornucopia of musical selections director Dave Steakley finds the heartbeat of this production, and let me tell you: It's a very, very rapid heartbeat.
EXPLOSIVE AND CHARMING, two adjectives very little aligned, are actually the most apt description for Zach Theatre’s 2015 interpretation of Charles’ Dicken’s classic A Christmas Carol (ACC). An usher in the lobby warned me on the way in, “Take everything you remember about A Christmas Carol from your childhood and forget it.” His endearing enthusiasm was enough to excite the most suspicious Scrooge in the place. And true enough, the performance took a few liberties …
Review: Parade by Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on December 03, 2015
Without elaborated stageplay, the music and storytelling of Parade seem condensed and enriched, adding to the power of a story about prejudice.
Parade by Robert Uhry and Jason Robert Brown is the story of the mob murder of Leo Frank, whose story ignited a powerful movement for justice in the early 20th centuryUnited States and led directly to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. The musical is up for a very short run now at Ground Floor Theatre, 979 Springdale Road in east Austin. It's an impressive work of art and a compelling up-to-the-minute statement on our …
Review: Dracula by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 28, 2015
For those like my sixth-grade friend Charlie who take Stoker and Shelly as serious as the Kabbala, this one's a must-see.
I met -- and avoided -- Dracula at an early age. Mly sixth-grade friend Charlie was fascinated by the classic narratives of Gothic horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He pressed them upon me, but their quaint and creepy 19th century style was too much. Reading their prose was like pulling a dust-laden velvet curtain back to look for a corpse in a coffin. Later I absorbed the 'horror movie' images of both, …
Review: Evita by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 22, 2015
Texas State University's EVITA was gripping and rich, a virtually flawless production of a classic of twentieth-century musical theatre.
Texas State University's production of Evita lit up like fireworks last week at the year-old Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre, a palace to the arts that puts most other performing spaces in Central Texas to shame. And like a fireworks display it surged and dazzled and then in a moment was gone. There's an unfortunate inevitability to programming there by the Theatre Department and the Musical Theatre Program: despite the talent, polish and setting, their theatrical …
Review: Other Desert Cities by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 21, 2015
Other Desert Cities is not a holiday play; but it does allow us to unwrap a mystery that turns out to be a gift to all concerned.
Sharp, contemporary and merciless, Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities has a lot to say. Just like protagonist Brooke Wyeth the young novelist who flamed out after an early success and suffered six years of writer's block and desperate depression. Brooke is visiting her parents in Palm Springs, that odd lush oasis in the California desert along I-10 east of Los Angeles. It's Christmastime, 2004, in the never-winter to which her parents have withdrawn in …
21st Century Theatre: Texting and Gesturing the Future in Austin productions of DEUS EX MACHINA and THE BOWIE PROJECT
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 20, 2015
Can we truly perceive a new thing? Two Austin productions in 2015 are candidates for future-forward potential.
January A digitally obsessive audience, its thumbs working furiously, sits around a thrust stage in the Rollins Studio Theatre at the Long Center in Austin. Produced with The Fusebox Festival and Shrewd Productions, the play is Whirligig Productions’ Deus Ex Machina and the year is 2015. The audience members hurriedly text yes/no and either/or responses to prompts on a screen above suppliants at the stage Oracle of Delphi. The texts go to the number of …