Recent Reviews
Review: Fixing King John by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 13, 2013
A wild ride, two hours or so including the intermission, Fixing King John doesn't so much fix/repair an inferior script as fix/set in our imaginations a portrait and a fable relevant to our own day, struggling mightily in contemporary American speech for meaning.
Kirk Lynn's script isn't Shakespeare. Fixing King John is a tight, fast story with dialogue full of fucking obscenities, one suited not for PBS but maybe to HBO. E. Jason Liebrecht creates King John as an edgy, angry, powerful capo with the force of Jimmy Cagney and the morals of Tony Soprano. Director Madge Darlington puts the Rude Mechs' staging into the confined space of their Off-Shoot rehearsal studio behind the Off-Center in east Austin. …
Review: Flu Season by Oh Dragon Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 11, 2013
Oh Dragon Theatre Company's choice of the Grayduck Gallery just off south First Street as the venue to stage Will Eno's The Flu Season is appropriate. The white walls, open space, and angled positioning of the seats for the audience create a stark setting for a stark play. In his odd little fable of anomie, set in a mental clinic, Will Eno tells a story that could squeeze our hearts if only he didn't keep …
Review: There is a Happiness that Morning is by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 08, 2013
Maher's 80-minute one act piece is exciting, dramatic, funny and deep -- an impressive script, and it's performed with élan, aplomb, assurance and feeling by the two leads, Catmull and Jason Phelps, who also has a long history with this venue.
There is a space that theatre is, Unknown except to the hip and cognoscenti -- where verse and blood, ironic plenty, dearth, death, desire and wit conjured forth from air, direct our eyes to great and lesser things unseen, unknown, unspoken in our media. Hyde Park, Cap T, Mick' Maher, Blake, knife-sharp, wit-full, astounding, take our souls in dance and squeeze our hearts, unglaze our eyes. Innocence? Experience? Groves of academe, Pierian springs, our lives, …
Review: Stars and Barmen by Vortex Repertory Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 06, 2013
Watching these ineptitudes and witnessingTrey Deason's presentation of grad student Rupert as a quivering, clownish loser, I began to sense that Hardy's idea of comedy didn't correspond very much with my own.
I was in the mood for a a feel-good experience on Halloween, something without fangs or fishnets or pumpkins, and the Vortex's blurb 'a romantic comedy about getting lucky in space time' enticed me to their staging of Reina Hardy's script. She is semi-local, after all, as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, and the Shrewds staged her piece Glassheart not too long ago. The Vortex, bless Bonnie's heart, has succeeded in transforming …
Review: A Streetcar Straight to Hell by Exchange Artists
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 01, 2013
All the actors showed great skill in operating the set, the props, their costumes, and themselves. When actors make the difficult look easy, then the outcomes of their actions are surprising rather than predictable.
For this Halloween edition of The Exchange Artists’ Hot Nights series, they changed the name to Hot Bloody Nights. Other key elements remained the same, including the typically high performing skills exhibited on-stage, teaming up with a musical group, location in an upscale watering hole, a one-night-only run, and creativity unbounded. The Exchange Artists haven’t missed a beat with this series since they started it more than a year ago. The show was based loosely, …
Review: Innocent When You Dream by Zeb L. West
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 27, 2013
West merged the stories of Don Quixote and Moby Dick into a lament for all lives and relationships gone wrong. Yes, this show was about love and loss.
Innocent When You Dream just shrieks festival piece—simple set design, simple-looking props, simply costumed performer sleeping and dreaming on-stage as the house opens. All these things have to be in place and removed quickly in a sequence of similar performance pieces performed in one evening. Then all of it has to be crated up and shipped to the next festival. After the curtain call, Zeb West, the creator and performer of Innocent When You Dream …