Recent Reviews
Review: Ain't Misbehavin' by Tex-Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 06, 2011
The performers could have dropped out of a 1930's movie reel. Your atention will be captured by the mini-dramas of Waller's songs, staged in various combinations of performers and in fact accumulating a greater sense and even a narrative.
Ain't Misbehavin' is a lively and exciting all-music evening at Tex-Arts, Lakeway, a Fats Waller "musical show" as promised in the subtitle. You might for one brief moment think that you were in a welcoming dive in Harlem, east St. Louis or the South Side of Chicago, as those five attractive and energetic performers and four-piece band sing, dance and blast away in the close quarters of the Kam and James Morris theatre out in …
Review: The Story Seekers by Exchange Artists
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 04, 2011
The grove of shelter has features of death, of memory, of limbo and of simple mythos or story telling -- perhaps those children exist only because we imagine them.
The Elizabeth Ney museum on E. 44th Street in Hyde Park is already haunted. A crowd of stark white plaster figures and busts stand in the shabby shaddows of the odd small Austin-stone castle that was Ney's final residence and studio from 1902 to 1907. Among them is a bust of German writer and philologist Jacob Grimm that she sculpted of the old man in Berlin in the 1850's. Grimm would have approved of Kattherine …
Review: West Side Story by touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 30, 2011
No film can give the scope and the dazzle of Robbins' large dance scenes, and the choreography reproduced by Joey McKneely for this staging delivers excitement, humor and far more action than your eye can follow.
A stage jammed with more than 30 trim, talented dancers, a 15-piece orchestra doing Leonard Bernstein's instantly recognizable score, a couple of memorable scenic pieces and a respectful interpretation of the 1957 reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet, tweaked only very slightly, if at all -- the touring company of West Side Story delivers exactly what the American public expects. The enterprise also provides an enlightening illustration of the difference between a film -- who hasn't …
Review: Alvida and the Airship Pirates by Weird City Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 30, 2011
Our Alvida is a princess betrothed against her will to a vain and clueless prince from a nearby realm; Chris Romani as Mommy the queen is a sourpuss and Daddy the king is a timorous wimp. The needs of high politics and allilance must be served at all costs.
I was on the last airship with Alvida out of Weird City on March 12 and as sometimes happens with scribes errant, I got too busy and distracted to send her, author John Carroll and their band of adventurers a proper bread-and-butter note. Your mother may have admonished you about good manners, as does the mother of my children. It’s never too late, although sometimes it’s too late to do much good. I prefer the …
Review: Measure for Measure by American Shakespeare Center touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 29, 2011
The real comic turn in this piece is Denice Burbach as Elbow the constable. She prances, flails, flings malapropisms and expostulates for all the world like Daffy Duck, though without Daffy's juicy speech impediment.
The towering American colonial revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards is remembered today principally for the hair-raising imagery in his 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, including especially his fierce warning, The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy …
Review: As You Like It by American Shakespeare Center touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 25, 2011
The ecstasy of the American Shakespeare Center's staging of As You Like It was that of infatuation, the hypnotic attraction of love.
"Restless Ecstacy," the title of the 2010-2011 tour by American Shakespeare Center players, comes from the Scottish play, III, 2, in which the grim thane uses the phrase to describe his tormented sleeplessness after killing King Duncan. The ASC troupe didn't do their Macbeth at the University of Texas in Austin this week, but their staging of As You Like It corresponded fully to both promises of the tour title. Noise, music, performance and joviality …