Recent Reviews
Review: The Screwtape Letters by touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 26, 2013
McLean creates a Screwtape who's certainly larger than life. The odd but imaginative set depicts a credibly comfortable afterlife for the evildoer, and McLean's gestures, blocking and vocal treatment convey his great relish for the text.
Max McLean certainly looked the part of Screwtape, the senior demon imagined by C.S. Lewis for his 1942 epistolary Christian novela The Screwtape Letters Portly and with an untidy mane of graying hair, comfortably elegant in a red quilted dressing gown, he was the picture of a sybaritic Victorian gentleman at home in his study with attendant hissing demon. Attendant demon? Well, yes; one imagines that as a relatively senior member of the administration of …
Review: The Interior Landscape of the Emotional Mind by Chaddick Dance Theater
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 25, 2013
The Chaddick company performed the dances of this integrated show in the hallways, balconies, rehearsal studios and alcoves of Ballet Austin, shifting the setting metaphorically into a many-chambered mind to show us facets of that often perplexing house within us all.
It was a cold night in Austin, made worse by the biting wind that swirled around its towers and roared down its streets. Inside Ballet Austin studios, Cheryl Chaddick and company lay in wait for their audiences with a well-prepared dance show that eventually took us to the forefront of Austin and regional contemporary dance. The Interior Landscape of the Emotional Mind was presented as a site-specific dance, or site dance. How fitting that an …
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 …