Recent Reviews
Review: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2009
The slightly risqué humor might merit a PG-13 if this were a movie, but frankly, it's just the sort of grinning adolescent naughtiness appropriate to the middle-schoolers the cast is portraying here.
This show is a charmer. It has the zing of a small scale musical, the familiarity of all those school auditoriums you endured while growing up, the uncertainties of a tournament, the highs of competition, the quips and laughs of improv comedy, and -- unexpectedly -- a second act that resonates with drama and tenderness.Michael Raiford's set is bright, functional and simple, using the Kleberg Stage's thrust stage as a "cafetorium" in an anonymous middle …
Review: Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 01, 2009
I'd much prefer to be like Connie with her wild but almost plausible notions of the theatre or like this dedicated, lively and attractive cast working under the guidance of a director who's a '98 honors alum of the same program.
Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet is a lighthearted little romp that sends up both Shakespeare and the academic ivory tower with a mischievous feminist sense of humor.Our heroine Constance Ledbelly is an undistinguished worker bee in the literature department of an unidentified university, where she has worked ably without recognition for her pompous supervisor Professor Claude Night. Her devotion to him is absolute but irrational, for he's a caricature of self-centered male vanity, …
Review: The Collection by Hyde Park Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 23, 2009
Pinter gives us a cynical meditation on trust and truthfulness. The cast plays it absolutely straight, establishing Pinter's rhythms and his merciless understatement of visceral emotion.
First of all, you are NOT going to get to see Joey Hood frolicking naked in a bathtub. That's just the way it goes. The Collection is not that kind of play. I guess that photo was just to good to pass up. Ken Webster's a Harold Pinter man. During Hyde Park Theatre's FronteraFest of short stage pieces back in January, the usual program of five thirty-minute pieces came up short when a couple of …
Review: bobrauschenbergamerica by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 21, 2009
In a fine, dizzying moment Jamie Goodwin wheels solo at the center of the Mary Moody "theatre in the square," invoking the magnificence and eccentricity of America in an unannounced and uncredited text that some of us recognized as pages taken from wild old Walt's Leaves of Grass.
Don't go looking for Robert Rauschenberg the 20th century modern artist in this grab bag. This is homage purely by reference.Playwright/facilitator Charles Mee is frank in his admission that the piece is a collage of ideas and random bits that had as their starting points some of the images that appear in Rauschenberg's work.Mee and others free associated about those images. They collected texts and images and other random bits to share in theatre workshops. …
Review: The Jungle by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 21, 2009
Central to the story is the rite of slaughter that takes place at center stage, a repeated dance of death. It's a haunting image and an intimidating act of virtuoso puppetry, and it comes again and again throughout this piece.
Connor Hopkins' The Jungle is a deeply serious work using high craft to dramatize the worst days of American industry. Upton Sinclair's 1906 piece, first published in serialization and then as a novel, caused a tremendous stir. He tells the story of an penniless immigrant family, crushed by corrupt exploitation, indifference, and unsanitary conditions of the Chicago meat packing industry. Sinclair's ambition had been to shake the American public into awareness of the inhumanity to …
Review: I've Never Been So Happy by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 19, 2009
The story of I've Never Been So Happy is simple and silly enough to qualify as mythic, an affectionate tweaking of the tales and characters familar in tales of Western settlement. The Lynn-Stopschinski partnership is a happy one.
It's clever. It's mythic. It's melodic. It's multimedia.It's the Rude Mechanicals still-in-workshop production of I've Never Been So Happy with book and lyrics by Kirk Lynn and music by Peter Stopchinsky, who also sings the part of the mountain lion.But it's short and it's incomplete. By design, it will leave you wanting more. The Rude Mechanicals have made for themselves an enviable place in the bubbling world of Austin's young non-Equity original-works theatres. The Rudes …