Recent Reviews
Review: A Ride with Bob by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 21, 2013
This jovial and tuneful evening is a blend of a good news mega-church service, a dance hall evening, serious biography and comedy routines of the sort that Homer and Jethro used to do for RCA and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
This was my first time to see this comical-historical-pastoral concert piece by Ann Rapp and Texas music star big Ray Benson. You might well have seen early stagings in 2005 or later tour dates; the public message is that this four-night-and-two-matinee celebration is happening this week, February 20 - 24, as a farewell to Austin. We may well hope that's a marketing ploy and not a definitive retirement decision, because the boys and girls in …
Review: Measure for Measure by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 19, 2013
The three Equity actors are fine and capable professionals, but I was left with the feeling that there was entirely too little room for St. Ed's undergraduate talent in the production.
Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare's darkest plays, an intimate and claustrophobic study of misrule. There are no great battles here, no dazzling displays of fancy; this mythical Vienna has a stifling ambiance, a combination of bureaucratic neglect, fetid bordello and sterile cloister. One can seek to read it as a comedy, which to some extent director Michelle Polgar has done, but one can also see it as a meditation on zealotry. Vincentio, Duke …
Review: Richard III by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2013
Veteran actor Eugene Lee swaggers, glowers and rebukes -- but by addressing us from the first, he turns us into his unwilling confederates. At his most duplicitous moments he gives us a canny glance to reassure us that he's not abandoning his embrace of evil.
Richard III is a portrait of a monster. He's a killer, more forthright than Iago and without a shred of the scruples of Macbeth. This is the protagonist who tells us he's going to court a grieving royal widow as she stands over her husband's body "though I kill'd her husband and her father," and achieves that impossibility. She agrees to marry him. Richard III was the portrait of a sociopath before the diagnosis was …
Review: STRIKE: I Am The Machine Gunner AND Martial Arts by Breaking String Theater
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on February 16, 2013
Any traces of nobility, socialistic brotherhood or love for Mother Russia have been washed out in the poverty and desperation of a nascent capitalist world of gangsters, corrupt cops, drug and alcohol abuse, Western films, and acting cool in the face of adversity.
Ambitious Desperation: A Look at Two Plays by Yury Klavdiev “I was spread-eagled on the sand: catching my breath. My overheated machine gun was lying next to me; it was catching its breath too.” The audience might indeed envy the machine gun’s respite as it is whirled along the riveting and volatile tale of a street thug appraising his life in terms of his hopes and his heritage in Yury Klavdiev’s one man opus, I …
Review: Other Desert Cities by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 14, 2013
In an age when 'dysfunctional' all too often is appended to 'American family' in the U.S. theatre, Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities spends much of its two acts appearing to explore yet another meltdown. Lyman and Polly Wyeth are prosperous California retirees with backgrounds in Hollywood and Republican politics. Their children are several sorts of messes. The older son got into drugs and then into political violence, getting implicated in a deadly firebombing before …
Review: Design for Living by Austin Shakespeare
by Christine El-Tawil
Published on February 11, 2013
Despite the speed of the exchanges and the posh accents, not one joke or pun was lost on the audience. The shifts between tense drama moments to absurdly lighthearted funny ones deeply engaged us.
Kara Bliss greets you with song as you enter the Rollins Studio Theater at the Long Center for Austin Shakespeare’s production of Design for Living by Noël Coward. Jason Connor accompanies her on the upright piano. Bliss’s soulful delivery of witty and fun compositions by Coward instantly transports you to the 1920’s. The puns and clever humor set the audience laughing even before the action began, particularly with references to “gay” behavior. In Coward’s time, …