Recent Reviews
Review: Freud's Last Session by Jarrott Productions
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 26, 2015
The play collects grand thoughts from people in an important time and place and fossilizes them beautifully in the amber of this Jarrott Productions show.
Freud’s Last Session, a one-act play by Mark St. Germain, has opened at Trinity Street Theatre in downtown Austin. This production of Jarrott Productions stars producer David Jarrott as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Tyler Jones as writer-philosopher C.S. Lewis.They enact a fictional meeting between the two intellectuals at Freud’s office in London on September 3, 1939, the day Britain and its allies declared war on Germany following Hitler’s invasion of Poland.Freud had relocated to London …
Review: Never Such Rain by Tegan McLeod
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 18, 2015
The moves of the final moments, when Jesse twists sinuously around Brandon and the clasp of their pistol, are deft, neat choreography summing up these two damned souls' relationship to the pitiless outer world.
Lily Wolff places Tegan McLeod's Never Such Rain on the stage of UT's Lab Theatre with the audience sitting on the twenty folding chairs along three sides of that space. This is theatre up close and in your face, the way I like it most. I was lucky to snag a chair at the Wednesday opening of this short run, for most had names of IndieGoGo supporters taped on them. I'd thought I could buy …
Review: Godspell by Emily Ann Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 12, 2015
As in most high-energy small-cast musicals, if you don't know individual cast members at the start, you'll feel that you do by the finale.
Medieval guilds and church clergy organized the mystery plays performed before cathedrals or in town pageants. The aim was devotional and pedagogical. Church services were conducted in impenetrable Latin, but festive costumes and drama of Bible stories vividly conveyed stories of the Old and New Testaments to populations that were devout but illiterate. Of the three 'tribal' musicals of late mid-twentieth-century American theatre, the 1970 Godspell by John-Michael Tebelak and Stephen Schwartz is closest to …
Review: Veronica's Room by Oh Dragon Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 07, 2015
At first you share the young woman's incredulity, but as the action proceeds and the stakes mount, you begin to ask yourself whether the playwright has cheated his willing audience.
Have you ever been 'gaslighted'? I didn't know that psychological term before attending Oh Dragon's production of Veronica's Room, but I'm not sure it would have protected me from the confusion and discomfit produced by Ira Levin's 1973 play. Not only were the characters malevolently manipulating one another's perceptions; Lewin the playwright was doing the same to those of us who naïvely agreed to play along with the usual conventions of suspension of disbelief. Ira …
Review: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 04, 2015
Michael Clnkscales has the quiver and rubber-faced grimaces for Pseudolus the tricky slave, but he also has a bounding physical energy. Jeff Philips as Hysterium the major domo is a fine deliberate distrustful foil. The two work together with the familiar ease of a vaudeville duo.
City Theatre's staging of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Foreum has all the cheery exuberance and somewhat retro fun of a toga party at a frat house -- do the on-campus Greeks do that anymore, or has such innocent naughtiness disappeared in today's overload of digital ersatz sophistication? If so, too bad for them; this evening of capers led by R. Michael Clinkscales is merrily nonsensical, a Sondheim/Shevelove/Gelbart celebration of the …
Review: Talking Pictures by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 01, 2015
If Foote can be compared to Chekhov, as director Nina Bryant suggests, then certainly the Gaslight Baker Theatre Company itself can be seen as containing and preserving all the character types and primal memories of a simpler Texas society.
Horton Foote tells quietly intimate stories set in the vast space of memory that is small-town Texas. That stretch of storytelling is nicely captured by the set and the surroundings of the Gaslight Baker Theatre in Lockhart. Talking Pictures reveals itself on a set of large plaforms standing in vast empty space, with the proscenium of the theatre-turned-movie-house-returned-to-theatre arching behind the notional outline of a house in east Texas. These stories are like a set …