Recent Reviews
Review: What Was I Thinking?? by Michelle Rundgren
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 05, 2009
The girlfriends were laughing rather than crying, though behind the hilarity was the feeling that the clock was ticking and eligible men were getting harder and harder to find. Isn't the best comedy often based on apprehension?
What Was I Thinking? is Michele Rundgren’s clever transformation of a book of women's tales of woe into a tipsy party of girlfriends who can laugh – now – at the world’s worst boyfriends and the world’s worst dates. The show ran for two weekends at the Hyde Park Theatre, and its sassy attitude brightened up that often foreboding space. I got there only at the closing show, on Halloween, which ran from 4 p.m. …
Review: Under the Gaslight by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 04, 2009
Ever wonder about the melodrama scene where the dastardly villain ties his victim to the railroad tracks?Iit didn't originate with Snidley Whiplash and Dudley Dooright, though that may be where you first saw it.
Ever wonder about the melodrama scene where the dastardly villain ties his victim to the railroad tracks? No, it didn't originate with Snidley Whiplash and Dudley Dooright, though that may be where you first saw it. Jay Ward was copying it out of a long tradition of silent movie serials that drew on saloon theatricals. Credit for the notion goes to New York theatre empresario Augustin Daly, in his 1867 production of this play, Under …
Review: The Turn of the Screw by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 03, 2009
Jenny Gravenstein uses her face, especially those luminiscent eyes, her posture, and carefully controlled voice and hands to draw us into the pool of flickering light that is the governess's spirit.
Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw takes you into a dark place. A brief chapter sets the scene. On Christmas Eve in an old house in the countryside a group of bourgeois friends has just listened to a ghost story. Their host, Douglas, offers them another, but they have to wait for a manuscript to be dispatched from his residence in London. That text -- "in old, faded ink, and in the most …
Review: The Trojan Women by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 03, 2009
When Verity Branco comes on as Helen of Troy, my God, we have got Jessica Rabbit in the flesh -- slinky black dress split to the hip, high heels, and scarlet elbow-length gloves.
I have puzzled and puzzled about this production. Meghan Kennedy and Kimber Lee preserve the approximate shape of Euripides' great tragedy. Their text rarely echoes his lines directly, but it includes scenes of sharp, cadenced prose or blank verse that evoke the terror and hopelessness of brutally widowed women left in tattered clothing, dirt and desperation. In particular, Kate DeBuys as Hecuba is magnificent. She projects a stunned concentration in which only the steel of …
Review: She Stoops to Conquer by The Classic Theatre of San Antonio
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 28, 2009
Ross and his cast set a fine rhythm to this, assisted by wry asides to the audience and the comic convention of having props proffered promptly over the screen at rear by an unseen hand.
She Stoops to Conquer, approaching its last weekend in San Antonio, is elegant, witty, and stylish. Director Allan S. Ross recreates the conventions of the 18th century English theatre, including the use of a nearly bare stage, a painted partition at the rear, and the actors' respectful but self confident acknowledgment of the ladies and gentlemen of the public.Goldsmith's work is a clever comedy of manners in which the men are all self-important bumblers of …
Review: Nosferatu by Weird City Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 27, 2009
The silhouetted figure of the lurking Count Orlach and shadow projections were highly effective, and the creepiest moment of all was his red-tinged emergence from that boxy coffin dominating center stage.
If you're looking for dark and spooky, then Weird City Theatre Company has got dark and spooky for you, down at the Dougherty Arts Center for the Thursday to Sunday Halloween weekend. These connoisseurs of the unnerving have blended Bram Stoker's Dracula and F.W. Murnau's unauthorized German expressionist film knock-off of the novel for a short, satisfying evening of the eerie. You could view the 84-minute video of Murnau's 1922 silent film as preserved by …