Recent Reviews
Review: Hamlet by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2009
City Theatre's Hamlet will carry you along its boisterous flow. Aaron Black is energetic and assertive, if not always very likeable. Destiny arrives at a gallop.
Director Jeff Hinkle and the City Theatre cast led by Aaron Black as Hamlet give us a gripping up-tempo version of the famous events in Elsinore. Elapsed playing time from the first challenge on the battlements to Hamlet's dying gasp, "The rest -- is silence" is just a little more than two and a half hours. That fits the play well within the max bounds for today's young movie-going public and gives them the bonus …
Review: Murder Ballad Murder Mystery by Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2009
The clowning was lots of Keystone Kops sort of stuff and some decadent red-neck carrying on. Most of the time the obviously talented musicians were mangling the tunes just the way that the whooping and hollering actors were mangling the stories.
Murder Ballad Murder Mystery is imagined and delivered as a clown show balanced precariously on deep and true traditional ballads. Those ballads are deep, because stories of passion, violence and murder are rooted somewhere pretty close to our shared DNA. True, because they contain archetypes of our culture: the restless husband; the innocent and defenseless girl-child; the rapscallion, the rapist, and the rowdy. Including, of course, musicians and theatre folk. Playwright Elizabeth Doss, who appears …
Review: Joan of Arc: The Night Before by Ad Astera
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 15, 2009
'Joan of Arc, The Night Before. . . . ' has the naked force of psycho-drama, a quality that is both its strength and its weak point.
Imprisoned by the English, unransomed by Charles VII although he owed his coronation to her, the 19-year-old Jeanne d'Arc was convicted of heresy by an ecclesiastical court and burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431. From the age of 12, this illiterate girl from a peasant family had had visions of saints urging the expulsion of the English armies from France. Through force of personality she managed to reach the court of the despairing …
Review: In.Car.Nation by Electronic Planet Ensemble
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 15, 2009
Behind David Jewell and Sergio Samayoa is the screen that flickers with video, kaleidoscopic images and transforming stills, a non-linear dream of transportation as power, elegance, and adventure.
Classic cars of the 1950s float in the collective consciousness of Americans, but as David Jewell gently admonishes us, they'll soon be gone, as distant and vanished as the dinosaurs that enchant our children today. Jewell is the solo narrator, actor and verbal imager for In.Car.Nation, while Sergio R. Samayoa provides the live soundtrack with computer-synthesizer and guitar. Jewell gives different first-person voices for his unnamed spoken characters, different rhythms, with a keen but deadpan …
Review: Julius Caesar by Emily Ann Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 14, 2009
This production moves fast and far, regularly penetrating the audience space or plunging into the semi-lighted woods on either side of the stage.
The conspirators of the Ides of March are at work deep in the hills south of Austin, Texas.Wimberley is a township with a population of fewer than 4000 persons, but its EmilyAnn Theatre is currently staging a muscular, articulate Julius Caesar that is well worth the winding 45-minute drive through ranch country.Known principally for summer musicals and the long running annual "Shakespeare Under The Stars" for young people, the park and outdoor amphitheatre of the …
Review: Talking With by North by Northwest Production Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 13, 2009
Martin's writing is sharp, perceptive and evocative, with each piece building to an epiphany, a turn or an insight. These actresses have the understanding and the rhythm of the pieces; they set the hook when appropriate.
The solo monologue is one of the purest demonstrations of the art. These six women come individually to you in the intimacy and immediacy of the City Theatre's small house. In each scene the actress takes that text with your complicity and, before your eyes, becomes the character. "Jane Martin" is probably a pseudonym for Jon Jory, who has directed all of her ten plays. The mysterious Jane has never been seen. She twice won …