Recent Reviews
Review: Hamlet (at Boggy Creek Cemetary) by Black Swan Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 28, 2010
You have to earn your trip to Shakespeare's imagined world by mentally surpressing the insistent, incessant sounds of Texas on the go. These players make that possible, always.
Justin Scalise as Hamlet is intent and impressive. AustinLiveTheatre had that to say and more in the September 25 ALT review of essentially this same production as presented downtown at the Scottish Rite Theatre -- in all too short a run and with a curtailed final week. This staging is by Black Swan Events. The swan is new hatched and because of the surprisingly poorly attendance at the Scottish Rite staging, it's new fledged, as …
Review: Siyavash by Philip Kreyche, Wit's End Theatre Project
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2010
Playwright-manager-director-actor Kreyche fashioned a script in vigorous blank verse and took the central role of Siyâvash. Combining all those responsibilities for a staging is rare these days and somewhat risky, but the declamatory form provided a reassuring framework.
That Philip Kreyche is a dab hand at theatre, a young man with imagination and a taste for the exotic. His earlier piece Love Me was an expressionist treatment of incidents in the life of the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. He staged it first at a summer workshop at Austin Community College and then brought it back for FronteraFest. I hadn't heard of Kokoschka. Kreyche's piece prompted me to do some research -- which …
Review: Mad Forest by Red Dragon Players, Austin High School
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 19, 2010
Pacing is sublime, suggesting a hesitancy, an overcoming and then a willingness to reveal these desires both to themselves and to one another. The act gathers speed and intensity in a crowded family scene including the shocking spectacle of a gleeful re-enactment of the execution of the Ceaucescus
Theatre is a lens. The audience and the players look through the action in the playing space to perceive a story in the collective imagination. That story may be entertaining, or trivial, or profound, and the clarity of the vision is directly affected by the skill of the players and the willingness of the audience to engage. The themes may be familiar. Take vampires, for instance. The century-old thrills of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel got …
Review: Mauritius by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 18, 2010
ACC's Mauritius stays firmly on the rails, with more than one sudden twist. Director Shelby Brammer keeps her cast at speed and they deliver that satisfying dénouement. There's a reason that the form of the well-made play has lasted so long.
Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius is in many aspects a well-made play, fitting neatly into the 19th- and early-20th century tradition in the United Kingdom and in France (there, as une pièce bien faite). Cribbing quickly from Wikipedia, that Cliff's Notes of the Internet, one gets the reminder that the well-made play has a strong neoclassical flavour, involving a very tight plot and a climax that takes place very close to the end of the story, with …
Review: Incorruptible by Paradox Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 13, 2010
Our monks contemplate the resources available to them in their own sanctified ground and, inevitably, they find the justification for going into the bone-exporting business big time. That's the basic joke of this show.
This cheery little satire might well have been titled Incorruptible - Men in Robes, marking a link to the comic style of the frankly inimitable Mel Brooks. As was always the case in Brooks' hysterical historical spoofs, the intent wasn't so much to portray the epoch as to emphasize that the seven deadly sins have always been with us -- particularly those of greed, envy and lust, the ones most likely to make us act …
Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 11, 2010
This is an evening to be enjoyed and remembered, one of clever, lively action, beautiful players and knockabout clowns, exquisite renaissance music, masques and costume.
A Midsummer Night's Dream may well be Shakespeare's most familiar comedy. In his review of Austin theatre for the World Theatre Day celebration last April Robert Faires noted it as one of those plays that "circle round again and again like pop songs in heavy rotation." You have to admit it: he's right. The Tex-Arts youth program did the show ten days before his remarks, then Austin Shakespeare did it in Zilker Park with 1960's …