Recent Reviews
Review: Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) by Poison Apple Initiative
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 07, 2010
Each of the three spins gently away into fantasy dialogues with dream figures or surrogates. Only mid-way does the playwright reveal the details of the fatal accident and then start an intrigue ticking.
You know that this single mom and her eleven-year-old daughter are in deep trouble from the very start, because the building tells you so. Michael Slefinger as The Apartment is an engimatic presence, miffed by their inattention, wearing a butterfly bow tie that confirms his nostalgia for long-ago elegance. His is the first voice we hear, and he hovers in this action as something between a Greek chorus and a malevolent haunting. Playwright Sheila Callaghan …
Review: Scrooge, the musical by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 02, 2010
Leslie Bricusse essentially does a Hanna-Barbera version of Charles Dickens' novella. Scrooge as Fred Flintstone -- loud mouthed, dim and aggressive in an oafish sort of way. But loveable, too, especially once he has been brought around by the visitations.
The Palace has once again put a gigantic effort into the casting, preparation and playing of its holiday musical. As with Annie last year , Scrooge the Musical by Leslie Bricusse has a big cast -- 24 bio'd players plus 23 charmers in the three children's casts (designated Nickleby, Copperfield and Pickwick, recalling characters from Dickens). Except for six principals, the roles are double- or triple-cast, a policy of sharing out that must have made …
Review: Morning's at Seven by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 26, 2010
Five strong, distinctive women actors play against four equally vivid men, and not a one of them is in years of the ardent twenty-somethings so familiar in this town.
Different Stages lives up to its name with this affectionate recreation of a vanished America. Paul Osborn created for his 1930's audiences a comforting family portrait, set in a small town. All three acts of Morning's at Seven take place in a back yard shared by two wooden frame houses. All except one of the nine characters are related. This gentle comedy was a quirky oldies play. All four of the Boulton sisters are in …
Review: Wait Until Dark by Way Off Broadway Community Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 17, 2010
I did have a woman seated somewhere behind me who probably had the habit of talking to her television at home, but others were kind enough to shush her into mostly silent attention to the action on stage.
Community theatre folks are glad that you came, and they make no pretense about that. They've worked for weeks, mostly after hours and on weekends, in an undertaking that doesn't pay the grocery bills or even the transportation expenses. I'm always touched and honored when players and staff position themselves to greet audience members as they come out of the theatre. Over decades of diplomatic assignments I regularly shook hands of officials receiving guests at …
Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 16, 2010
Christi Moore and her cast have created three hard drinkers condemned to retain fluency of invective and imagination without losing visions of disaster.
I knew that this was going to be intense. I had invited friends to see it with me, and we had seats in the middle of the front row, south side of the "theatre in the square" at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre. After Michelle Polgar had dedicated the opening night's performance to the memory of Oscar Brockett, that grand old man of Austin theatre, the lights began to fade and I had a feeling …
Review: Baal by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2010
Brecht gives characters elevated language that at times passes for verse -- Baal is always yammering on about the sky -- but that's not enough in itself to retain our attention.
Baal was Brecht's first play, written in 1918 at the age of twenty. He had avoided the draft by taking a medical course and he was called up to staff a venereal disease clinic only a month before the war ended, and much of that time he was studying theatre. Brecht did not articulate his doctrine of theatrical alienation until 1935, but this text and the production of it by Dustin Wills and the Paper …