Recent Reviews
Profile and Video: Trouble Puppet's RIDDLEY WALKER, a Work in Progress
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 21, 2011
Hopkins warned us that Hoban writes the tale in an imagined future jargon that initially may appear obscure. "Read it out loud," he suggested. "And after the first five pages or so, you'll have no trouble at all."
Connor Hopkins and the gang at Trouble Puppet Theatre Company invited their e-list followers over to the Salvage Vanguard Theatre studio on two Saturday nights, January 8 and 15, to get a look at their works in progress. The evening began with The Red Tree, one of several pieces developed in Caroline Reck's "Object Theatre Workshop" and moved to several scenes the company has roughed out for the production of Riddley Walker scheduled for September …
Review: Humble Boy by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 18, 2011
Playwright Jones creates vivid characters and director Jonathan Urso runs them through amusing clashes and quirky incidents, including a grimly funny series of missteps with the ashes of the late lamented James Humble.
Tom Stephan is a revelation in Different Stages' Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones, playing through the end of the month at the City Theatre. In Austin Shakespeare's production of The Tempest last September he was a dismayed and battered King Alonso of Naples, cast ashore in the opening scene and awkwardly penitent in Act V. Here, as Felix Humble, the title character of Jones' sardonic social comedy, Stephan is vividly alive, so inventive and subtle …
Review: Surfin' UFO by Electronic Arts Ensemble
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 10, 2011
Electronic Planet Ensemble is surfin' big themes on comic book concepts with surfboards and hula hoops, and you have no idea what they're going to do next to your consciousness.
David Jewell's word pictures lift beyond the Vortex space, riding with the waves of music, percussion and video, and the Electronic Planet Ensemble delivers us to someplace exalted and different and yet familiar. They are surfin' big themes on comic book concepts with surfboards and hula hoops, and you have no idea what they're going to do next to your consciousness.Back in the Age of Aquarius this would have been far out, prime foodstuff for …
Review: A Christmas Carol, one-actor by Bernadette Nason
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 16, 2010
Bernadette with her expressive face and sweet, clear English accent has the unimposing charm of a gamine, a young and playful woman, a presence that makes all the more impressive the range of characters she creates.
Austin Playhouse provides an atmospheric little set for Bernadette Nason's telling of A Christmas Carol, and she's in costume when she enters primly from the single door at upstage right. Nason smiles an acknowledgment of us as she hangs up coat and scarf, then turns to address us. From that point the story takes over, for Bernadette delivers Dickens' quick-moving, vivid text with crisp assurance and deft, economical mime. No exaggerations or mugging here; a …
Review: The Trip to Bountiful by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 11, 2010
In performance all that light and liberty disappears, for director Toner situates these actors in the dark confines of a black box, provided with minimal props and simple furnishings. The concept is so stark and featureless that the Playhouse lists no credit for stage design.
This is a memory play, an exercise in yearning -- not only for the principal character Carrie Watts, but also for playwright Horton Foote and for the audience. Where are they, those vanished earlier times, and what were they really like? Depending entirely on her son and her daughter-in-law in their apartment somewhere in the Houston of 1953, Carrie Watts longs to return to her home, a house somewhere in rural Texas at a crossroads …
Review: La Pastorela 2010 - A Shepherdla's Story by ALTA Teatro
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 09, 2010
The cast doesn't bother with a curtain call. Instead, San Miguel with his self-assurance commands us forth to the plaza, where to the children's delight they find a devil-shaped piñata awaiting, suspended from the balcony.
La Pastorela, the tale of the shepherds on their way to Bethlehem in search of the promised newborn babe, has a lot of history behind it. That Bible story came to the New World with the Spanish troops and frailes who occupied the New World, of course, and while accepting that account, the indigenous peoples interpreted in terms of their own experience. La Pastorela tells the story of Gila, the shepherdess who receives a visitation …