Recent Reviews
Review: Pride and Prejudice by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 17, 2009
This Pride and Prejudice has elegance in speech, in dress, in ceremony and in setting. You'll find no surprises in the story line and no distortions or intrusive modifications.
Pride and Prejudice at UT's B. Iden Payne Theatre is a beautiful, graceful production. This is a musical text, and not only because of the jigs and reels at the balls sponsored by cheerful Mr. Bingley. Jane Austen's familiar novel about impoverished young ladies and their ultimately successful romances is written largely in dialogue, with cadence, understatement, wit, parry and riposte, quite as if it were a verbal score. No wonder it has been so …
Review: The Life of Galileo by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 16, 2009
. David Stahl inhabits that personality with the tidy self congratulation of Bilbo Baggins. He is impish rather than arrogant, and he's querulous about the tedious need to take students and to devise practical applications.
A lot is going on in Brecht's The Life of Galileo, and not just onstage. The program notes at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre will help you some, with a tidy summary of the historical figures, the heliocentric Ptolemaic model of the universe, and the heretical but accurate Copernican revision of it, and some of the elements of the plot. With that crib sheet you can comfortably follow the depiction of that impatient and skeptical …
Review: The Little Mermaid by Scottish Rite Theater
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 13, 2009
SRCT keeps it simple, keeps it colorful and keeps it moving. The four actors and stage manager are funny and appealing. Characterization is broad and comic. The cast frequently speaks directly to the audience.
The excitement of theatre vibrates in the air in the classic space of the Scottish Rite Children's Theatre in central Austin. On Saturdays, Sundays, and some mid-week performance days a bubbling crew of 3-to-8-year-olds occupies the mats in the center of the auditorium, while parents and less daring children occupy the conventional theatre seats. The energy level is as high as any Broadway opening night. This is a volatile crowd, in the literal sense of …
Review: Leave It to Beverly by DA! Theatre Collective
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 11, 2009
Eventually the girls discover great big tins resembling 2-gallon Campbell's soup containers, labeled "HA.HA.HA." Within them is a gelatinous colored substance that has got to be the canned laughter that permeates their existence.
Kirk German's Leave It to Beverly is a rib-tickler. His characters and cast go sailing off into TV Land of the 1950s and 1960s, taking the gags and the mannerisms way up over the top. DA! applies its energetic young 21st-century humor to Mom and Pop's naive entertainments and comes away a winner. Consider, for example, canned laughter. The early days of television featured many programs filmed before live audiences, but with rising costs and …
Review: Wait Until Dark by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 09, 2009
Even if you know the famous 1967 Audrey Hepburn/Alan Arkin film version of the acclaimed Broadway play, you are going to find yourself engaged in this meticulously plotted story.
Harry Roat is a really, really mean guy. In this Gaslight Baker Theatre production of Wait Until Dark, David Young plays Roat with alarming, menacing stillness as he snares two minor ex-cons into the hunt for a lost shipment of heroin, setting them up as potential fall guys for a murder that Roat himself has just committed. Yes, this is the one about Suzy, the blind woman that the bad guys are trying to confuse …
Review: The Cherry Orchard by Breaking String Theater
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 06, 2009
Director Graham Schmidt has made canny matches between Chekhov's vivid characters and the Austin acting talent happily available to him.
What is this quiet exhilaration I feel in the presence of Chekhov? Especially when the piece is as well played as this one?For opening night at the Blue Theatre many of the seats were taken by young persons who might well have been undergraduates. Directly opposite me, across the three-quarter thrust of the playing space, one or two had spiral notebooks and pencils in hand. I cannot recall if the vision of this end-of-the-19th-century Russian …