Recent Reviews
Review: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert by touring company
by Catherine Dribb
Published on May 11, 2013
Priscilla Queen of the Desert is a rambunctious montage of 80s chart-toppers and truly magnificent costuming. The national tour which pulled into Austin last week is no exception. Unlike our trailer eateries, Priscilla (a fabulously renovated old bus) supports no hipsters, cowboys or college students typical to the Austin scene, but rather a trio of performers. Two drag queens and a transvestite are traveling through the outback to perform at one of their member's, Tick's, …
Review: Same Time, Next Year by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 29, 2013
The world of the play is pretty much irrelevant to the contemporary world of instant messaging, hooking up, friends with benefits, living together without sanction of marriage and easy divorces. And to anyone born since the play was first staged in 1975.
Yes, I would be delighted to enjoy a guilt-free assignation once a year with the energetic, sweet and affectionate Virginia Keeley. Fellow actor Bill Barry has had that privilege this month at the Georgetown Palace, at least in our imaginations. Since the six scenes in Bernard Slade's play span the twenty-four years between 1951 and 1975, Barry's averaging just about one imaginary assignation a day. (And by his exuberant count in the final scene, 116 …
Review: Mad Beat Hip & Gone by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 21, 2013
The brilliant Michael Raiford and videographer/projectionist Colin Lowry must have loved the challenge to fill all that looming space, because they do an amazing job of it.
At first I was disconcerted by the time-line. Playwright-director Steven Dietz places his creations the Nebraska buddies Danny and Rich in 1949 and engineers an encounter with beat adventurers Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. We don't see it; as in ancient Greek theatre that event is reported to us, endowing it with distant mystery and epic sense. But in the opening scenes of Mad Beat Hip & Gone, suddenly Jacob Trussell as Danny is ranting …
Review: The Importance of Being Earnest by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 19, 2013
This play is as toothsome as a plate of scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam. My one request would have been, "Please, may I have some more?" By that, I mean that I'd really like to have seen more.
The delightful wit and frivolity of Oscar Wilde's conceit for this play and the immense seriousness his characters apply to it make The Importance of Being Earnest an enduring favorite. This is the fourth staging of the work in the region since I began writing about theatre nearly five years ago, and it never grows stale. Wilde is not Shakespeare, but his work has a similar vitality and adaptability. His razor-sharp teasing of a distinct …
Review: Slowgirl by Hyde Park Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 24, 2013
Greg Pierce's script has vivid, often wildly comic dialogue and a story of satisfying depth and emotion. The two actors onstage are joined by a full unseen cast in their back stories.
I went to Costa Rica twice this week with Becky to see Sterling. Snapped up the opportunity to slip into a Monday evening preview of Slowgirl by Greg Pierce at the Hyde Park Theatre. Then on Friday I took Karen along to Sterling's open-air hacienda in the dry jungle nine hours away from San José, the capital. It wasn't a long visit -- just under ninety uninterrupted minutes on the veranda and at the labyrinth …
Review: Lady Windermere's Fan by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 13, 2013
There is so much brainy wit here that at times I regretted the director's choice to keep the dialogue rattling forward like the Schlitterbahn.
Oscar Wilde wrote and proclaimed almost to tedious extent about aestheticism in his early career as writer, lecturer and journalist, and he was so well known for his extravagance and opinions that Gilbert & Sullivan had caricatured him in their 1881 operetta Patience. Wilde wrote a couple of dramatic tragedies in the 1880s that came to nothing, and in 1891 he wrote Salomé, in French. The Lord Chamberlain put a stop to Sara Bernhardt's plan …