Recent Reviews
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 …
Review: South Pacific by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 06, 2013
Much of the ensemble is made up of folks just like us – who happen to have been blessed with fine singing voices and proximity to the Palace, queen of musical theatre in Central Texas.
The Georgetown Palace Theatre has done it again. The production of South Pacific playing weekends through March, 2013, is energetic, polished and entertaining, a celebration of the classic 1949 musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein. It’s a reminder that at mid-century American musical theatre pioneered new directions in entertainment for a public newly aware of the world beyond Main Street, USA. With their first collaboration Oklahoma! in 1943 Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II drew a …
Review: Edges, a song cycle by Austin Theatre Project
by David Glen Robinson
Published on March 04, 2013
Out of the musical mass of beer drinking, Facebookin’ and growing up normally there emerged a few of these more resonant bright spots, which naturally shone more brightly by the contrast.
The Austin Theatre Project (ATP) production of Edges by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul gave Austin beautiful music and performances guaranteed to please audiences. Problems with the production and Pasek’s and Paul’s relatively new and somewhat uneven show shouldn't certainly not scare away ticket buyers, certainly not the heart-and-soul musical theatre fanatics who live for it.The program notes were about the music and nothing but the music. They explained the show as a song cycle …
Review: Richard II by Poor Shadows of Elysium
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 01, 2013
Richard II is a text that's rarely performed, so true believers do the rest of us a service by blowing off the dust and showing it to us.
The Poor Shadows of Elysium is newly established but its principals and associates are well known to the curious collection of Shakespeare enthusiasts in Austin. After appearing in recent years as Oberon, Prospero, Mercutio, and Marcus of Titus Andronicus, Kevin Gates surrendered to the lure of Renaissance drama and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Texas State. His partner and executive producer Bridget Farias has been running the EmilyAnn Theatre in Wimberley with summer "Shakespeare …
Review: A Steady Rain by A Chick and A Dude Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 28, 2013
Huff's language is so vivid and Ken Bradley's delivery of it is so intense, convincing in rhythm and dialect and so disturbing that one stumbles out of the theatre afterward with images seared into one's imagination.
Keith Huff imagines a dark, dark world for us, and Shanon Weaver's set design mirrors that. This is Chicago in grim weather. The bare stage has only a couple of banged up folding chairs and a table, and the stage walls are painted in vertical strips of greenish blue and black. It could be an interrogation room but really it's a barren nowhere, a place of the mind that one could just as easily imagine …
Review: The Ivy House by Chris Fontanes, Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 28, 2013
Memoryspeak by these characters informs us of a pregnancy, an accident that was really a suicide, a fierce breakup and abandonment and a despairing effort to reach beyond the grave.
The very venue is a dream catcher. This tidy wood-frame two-story house is situated on Garden Street -- hence its bed & breakfast title The Eponymous Garden -- and it's saturated with atmosphere. Owner Sterling Price-McKinney has written scripts for performance here in connection with the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, and this is the location for the SVT's annual fundraiser. This isn't the Austin of of the politicians and high rollers who used the Driskill Hotel …