Recent Reviews
Review: The House on Haunted Hill by Weird City Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 09, 2015
'House on Haunted Hill' is a brilliant work precisely because it doesn’t know what it wants to be—ghost story, slasher film, or crime drama/mystery.
Weird City Theatre has just opened its long-awaited new production, House on Haunted Hill, at Ground Floor Theatre on Austin’s east side. The show is something old and something new, a new stage adaptation (perhaps the only one) of the 1959 Vincent Price movie of the same name produced from the screenplay by Robb White. Today’s stage adaptation is by Robert L. Berry, a stalwart, multi-talented member of Weird City Theatre and other regional companies. …
Review: A View from the Bridge by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 07, 2015
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE at Texas State is complex, gripping and accomplished, theatre of the highest quality.
Sublimely imagined, cast and presented, Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge at Texas State is a production any commercial playhouse would dream to equal. Miller was at the top of his form and very much in the public eye when he created the revised two-act version of this piece in 1956, seven years after Death of A Salesman and three years after The Crucible and its witch-hunting theme riled the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. …
Review: Stalking John Barrowman by Last Act Theater Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 05, 2015
This show wins with fresh wit and seemingly new melodies. The songs also render that giggly middle-school humor of presenting a few sly obscenities in song.
Stalking John Barrowman is a delightful, uproarious, sensational work of musical theatre. It has all of those qualities in abundance, plus it is loaded with that dry, obscene British wit, the kind Americans love. Think Monty Python’s Flying Circus with pussy, twat, and labia jokes. Don’t forget the twins Poo and Pee. No, stop what you’re thinking; it is all presented quite cleanly, with surprise after surprise, none of which will be revealed here. The …
Review: Much Ado About Nothing by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 05, 2015
In this sprightly production the transformation of the sullen Don John into Dona Giovanna (Leanne Holmquist) is deft, apt, clear and powerful.
"Twenty-one productions in thirteen years!" director Monette Mueller informed opening-night spectators gathered before the torch-lit boards of the Curtain Theatre. The Baron's Men first performed in October, 2002 on a makeshift stage erected that very day. Their patron Richard Garriott later had a tidy Elizabethan-style stage erected for them on the north bank of the Colorado River, just west of the 360 bridge, and they've explored Shakespeare and other authors of early modern drama in …
Review: Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2015
Washburn's work is a think piece with worthy aims, but it fails to connect with the audience precisely because of its thesis.
American popular imaginings of recent years have been enamoured of dystopian tales of post-industrial collapse. It's not a new trope: Orson Welles' 1939 War of the Worlds hinted at it and Neville Shute's 1959 On the Beach haunted a Western world newly conscious of the H-Bomb. Hollywood has been tearing civilization apart with CGI-FX glee for decades; the first Mad Max movie was in 1979. Cormac McCarthy's 2006 The Road is a stark father-and-son survival …
Review: The Real Thing by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 27, 2015
Wit is not obliged to be funny. THE REAL THING isn't a comedy, but it flashes with insights of a grown-up exploration of the contracts of human hearts.
Wit is not obliged to be funny. The Real Thing isn't a comedy, but it flashes with insights and features exchanges as swift, surprising and unexpected as those of a fencing match. Austin Playhouse provides an assured and impressive production of this grown-up exploration of the hearts' contract that is the essence of any lengthy intimate relationship. And most particularly, its exploration of the issues of emotional fidelity and toleration of sentimental and sexual relationships …