Recent Reviews
Review: Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 18, 2011
The comedy in this piece is actor-driven, dependent on the players' sharpness in establishing the eccentrics. The range is wide.
Neil Simon's set-up for Laughter on the 23rd Floor is simple and classic, if you can abstract from the biographic aspects of it. A newcomer enthusing about his new job discovers that his work colleagues are eccentrics, each more bizarre and devastatingly verbal than the previous one. Their employer, initially unseen, has enormous stature with the public, but they all know that he is a generous, distracted borderline psycho. Set 'em ricocheting off one another, …
Review: Defiant by Debutantes and Vagabonds
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 12, 2011
Brant could have usefully and instructively explored the rich contradictions of resentment and grief suggested by Dawn Erin's performance. But his naive nightmare vision of this country is so astonishingly distant from our reality that it entirely undermines the emotional content.
George Brant's Defiant is bleak and stupid. There, after chewing on it for a week, I have spat it out. Not happily, because this gives me an unbroken record of writing negative reviews about this theatre ensemble. Of the four of their productions I've tracked to date, I missed A Brilliant Revolution and The Virgin with 10,000 Arrows, both of which got respectful reviews. After seeing their May 2009 evening of short works under the …
Review: You Wouldn't Know Him/Her, He/She Lives in Austin/Edinburgh (March) by Hidden Room Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 11, 2011
The Austin-London production uses a boy-meets-girl story with not a lot of nuance. Actors working their respective audiences had the opportunity to create and maintain character, but it appeared they were spinning that cloth from a very short supply of thread.
Artists are intrigued by the possibilities of social media, a fascination that they share with commercial enterprises, institutions, marketing strategists and your old granny. (In 2010-2011 the share of the U.S. over-55's on Facebook quadrupled to 9.5%, because of a more than nine-foldincrease in their numbers, to just under 10 million creaky Facebook boomers.) It's no surprise that Austin with its happily volatile mixture of knowledge industries and creatives is exploring that fuzzy junction of …
Review: Top Dog/Underdog by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 10, 2011
Romeo is tall, tense and cerebral. McArthur Moore as his younger brother Booth is a bouncy, jivy, arrogant womanizer who dreams of dazzling the marks in the three-card-monte scam.
You have missed an extraordinary experience. Almost all of you. Lisa Jordan's staging of Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks takes place this evening and then three more times, and then it's gone forever. Yes, I didn't get to the City Theatre production until late in the run. That wasn't willful neglect but just a queueing problem. I have a season ticket to the City, but there is so much theatre in Austin, much of it unusual, …
Review: On the Verge (or The Georgraphy of Longing) by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 08, 2011
Overmyer's dialogue is often as rich as blank verse, deserving of a good tasting in the mouth, but Long and his players are usually moving too fast to let us savor it.
"Bebe Rebozo!" Those two words summarize the wit and triviality of Eric Overmyers' On the Verge (or The Geography of Longing), now playing at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward's University. I laughted at the sudden illumination of an impression from 40 years ago. Bebe Rebozo - Richard Nixon's buddy. The Florida banker. The guy with the home in Key Biscayne where our Darth Vader president took refuge from the demands of office. …
Review: Hedda Gabler (adapted) by Palindrome Theatre (2010-2013)
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 05, 2011
Nigel O'Hearn faithfully follows the mechanics of Ibsen's intrigue in this version. His principal innovation is the pungent contemporary language he gives these characters.
Hedda Gabler puzzled and annoyed audiences across Europe when it was first staged in 1890 and 1891 -- pretty much the same reaction Ibsen had elicited with most of his later plays. He was 61 when he wrote this one, exasperated with the bourgeois public that went to the theatre and purchased copies of his plays. The last lines of the play are spoken by Judge Brack, that worldly sybarite who took Hedda's husband George …