Recent Reviews
Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream by Chaotic Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 10, 2010
director Michael Floyd appeared not to have defined for his company a relation with the audience, which was full and friendly that Friday evening. Soliloquies generally went into empty air, with actor's eyes directed about two feet above the heads of the audience.
This edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream was not chaotic at all, despite the name of presenting company. It was a straight-up, by-the-rules staging of Shakespeare's most popular piece.That doesn't mean that it was tidy or even, though. Director Michael Floyd and the Chaotic Theatre band had some assorted neat ideas but little vision to tie them together.Warm-up and intermission music was by the two guitars, drum and woman singer of a combo named 11 …
Review: Urinetown by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 09, 2010
This was a polished, well-designed, well-lit and exciting production. Every member of that big cast was on top of it, in synch, in character and visibly enjoying the show.
Southwestern University students had a joyful frolic with Rick Roemer's vigorous production of the smart-alecky musical Urinetown last week. This show won the 2002 Tony awards for best original score for a musical and for best book of a musical.The show gives us a cheeky, animated cartoon story of a bleak, bleak future world when water has run out. The common folk are obliged to cross their legs and hold their own water until they …
Review: The Glass Menagerie by Tex-Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 05, 2010
This play really belongs to the women. Babs George is haunting as Amanda Wingfield, the mother, as lustrous, elegant and outdated as a hurricane lamp. George herself is graceful, unlined and unbent, appearing almost too young to be their mother.
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, narrator Tom Wingfield tells us in his opening soliloquy. Director Michael Costello and the gifted actors in this cast treat it as just that, a dream-like sequence of deeply felt events taking place in the shadowed, intimate space of Tex-Arts' Kam and James Morris Theatre out in Lakeway. For those who don't know or have forgotten this American classic: it's the late 1930s. A mother and her two …
Review: Evita by McCallum Fine Arts Academy
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 03, 2010
There's a curious disconnect in this show between the languages, due to the Spanish reworking of the texts to fit the music and due to awkwardness of monolingual English speakers delivering Spanish by rote.
McCallum Fine Arts Academy's production of Evita, playing last weekend and next, is a bravado performance, a challenging musical act carried out on the tight wire between two languages. Technical director Scott Tatum greeted the opening night audience with the news that this is not only a bilingual performance; it is the first bilingual performance of the 1978 piece by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The McCallum staff spliced together the scores and libretti …
Review: Shakespeare's Husbands and Wives by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 01, 2010
You can slice Shakespeare all sorts of ways, and unless you're doing it with malice aforethought, the text is, in the end, still Shakespeare. Jill K. Swanson has dug out some of the juicy bits and given them to folks who know how to act them.
In this diverse fast-food town you can even get tasty Bard bits in a quick drive-by. No carry-outs, other than the program for Shakespeare's Husbands & Wives, but you're assured of comfortable seating and a varied menu at a session only 40 minutes in length. This Wednesday through Friday only, at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road, for the modest contribution of $10.Jill K. Swanson has appeared often on Austin stages over the past dozen …
Review: The 1940s Radio Hour by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 01, 2010
The theatre audience becomes the studio audience, responding appropriately to the applause signs. They get involved in all those secondary stories and relationships unfolding behind the folks currently talking into the big old clunky microphones down front.
Can there by anyone who doesn't appreciate the warm sepia glow of old time radio broadcasts? Of course, many favorite films from the 1930s and 1940s provide a similar feeling of nostalgia, but their images make a different experience. An old-time radio broadcast was magic because it came right into your home and into your head. Millions of Americans shared the experience of being, literally, "the radio audience" -- from audire, Latin, "to listen." Those …