Recent Reviews
Review: The Strangerer by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 14, 2015
Now, six years further down the road and here in the heart of Texas, Robert Pierson and Capital T turn this piece into an exploration of man's incapacity to understand. The focus is far less on the missteps of an administration than on our plight when faced with random catastrophe and evil.
Mickle Maher's The Strangerer is profoundly witty. But it's not comical. You may go into the agreeably conspiratorial Hyde Park Theatre with the expectation of laughing it up on the dark side, making fun of politicians in general and Bushes in particular, but you're going to get a short sharp shock. Capital T Theatre, Mark Pickell's comfortable co-conspirator with Ken Webster's Hyde Park Theatre, is going to get up your nose with some serious absurdity. …
Review: Good Weather for Bundt Cakes by Cinnamon Path Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 06, 2015
Max Langert's Good Weather for Bundt Cakes is a talky piece, using revelation, conflict and resolution rather than introspection. Director Christi Moore keeps this 80-minute script cracking along at a pace that has you glancing around expectantly to see where the next surprise is coming from.
Bundt. BUNDT. Bundtbundtbundtbundt. Bundt. Needs sugar butter not margarine flour weed. Weed? Well, maybe, when Mom's unpredictably delusional and big siter Rebecca is trapped and Dad died six months before and that runaway sister Julia turns up with an attitude and a backpack of needs that were never satisified. Max Langert's three-character play takes place in a suburban home, and that in fact is exactly where it's staged: in a suburban ground-floor duplex in Austin's …
Review: The Flip Side, short plays by TILT Performance Group
by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 01, 2015
Every audience member who has ever performed on stage has a meltdown of feeling seeing these young artists showing the courage, the willingness to be seen, of setting foot on stage and creating their own piece of performance art.
Tilt Performance Group’s production of The Flip Side, an evening of short playlets commissioned for the show, is playing now through June 5th at Ground Floor Theatre (GFT) on the east side. The show is a co-production of Tilt Performance Group and Ground Floor Theatre. Tilt is a company formed of differently abled young artists with various physical and developmental challenges who have banded together to find ways to perform after high school. In the …
Review: Waiting for Godot by City Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 25, 2015
Every production of 'Waiting for Godot' now is all about how it is produced; City Theatre’s production stands up well to any production of it, perhaps anywhere.
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett may be the best literary statement of post-World War II angst in existence, and it's an influential expression of where we remain philosophically in the post-Holocaust Nuclear Age. Playing now at City Theatre in east Austin, it's a monument of 20th century modernist theatre produced frequently in the current era, a work never to be missed when presented nearby. Most dedicated theatregoers know the story: the play comes to …
Review: The New Electric Ballroom by Renaissance Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 25, 2015
Underwood and Jambon give a terrible urgency to this text and concept. Fiercely intimidating, Jennifer Underwood applies Walsh's words like fileting knives. Karen Jambon reacts with the confusion and exuberance of a child uncertain if she's about to be whipped or rewarded.
Enda Walsh's The New Electric Ballroom is an astonishing achievement, both for the Irishman's text and Renaissance Austin's staging of it. This is theatre deep and dark and harrowing, art that stands with the best of Beckett, and it's right here in Austin for two weekends more. Plain powerful language delivers images of a fishing village in remote Ireland. Walsh's wild imagining of the absurd places us inside a dark cottage with three women. Two …
Review: Our Town by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 20, 2015
Trinity Street Players take us far away for the evening and at the same time they bring us back home.
I'm still a bit out of kilter and pensive. Just days after Stage Manager Scot Friedman gave the audience his confiding opening-night tour of Our Town, Grover's Corners, NH, we spent a weekend in St. Joseph, Michigan. An extended family clustered around three nonogenarian brothers as they went back to the scenes of their 1930s boyhood. Their town's not a lot larger than Grover's Corners and it's equally well furnished with memories. Our Town is …