Recent Reviews
Review: Stop The World, I Want to Get Off by The Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 12, 2009
'Stop The World, I Want To Get Off' is a sprightly entertainment, but one with references and nuances that probably puzzled younger members of the cast at first. Those of us with a few wrinkles had the opportunity to smile.
Nathan Villareal's agile clowning and appealing tenor voice are at the heart of the Wimberley Players' production of Stop The World, I Want to Get Off, playing weekends through August 23. As Littlechap, the Everyman in this circus-themed musical entertainment, Villareal gives us a cocky Cockney social climber, resembling actor/pop singer Anthony Newley, who put the show together with composer Leslie Bricusse in 1961.The show is an interesting mix of genres, part cabaret and part …
Review: Steel Magnolias by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 12, 2009
The characters, women friends of long date, inhabit a sacred space in their imagined reality; the Trinity players present their story in the sacred space of theatre; and the third-floor black box theatre is one of several sacred spaces provided by the First Baptist Church.
I was invited this past weekend to attend the closing performance of Steel Magnolias, produced at the First Baptist Church, 901 Trinity Street, by the aptly named Trinity Street Players. The audience filled the black box theatre, a converted space on the upper floor of the church, in which banks of raised seating stood on three sides of the rectangular playing space.Both the venue and the disposition of the stage brought to mind one of …
Review: No Se Paga! We Won't Pay!
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 11, 2009
In Non si paga, non si paga! Fo provides us cardboard characters whose principal appeal comes from their foolishness and the upside-down values of the society around them.
On the evidence of this production alone, I would have to conclude that Rupert Reyes is a better playwright than Dario Fo, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997.Fo, a prolific and provocative theatre artist, was in the thick of Italian political debate from the 1960s through the 1990s. He and his wife Franca Rame were social activists and she was a member of the Italian Communist Party. They and others occupied an …
Review: As You Like It by Scottish Rite Theater
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 10, 2009
No tears, no swashbuckling, lots of laughter at human folly -- this is a captivating night of amusements.
As You Like It is one of the gentlest and most whimsical of Shakespeare's works, a playful edifice built on oppositions.The court versus the forest, autocratic brothers excluding their less influentialbrothers; lovers vying in vain for their ladies and, inevitably, a fair maid cross-dressing as a fair youth. An aged servant finances with his last savings the flight into the forest of his impetuous young master. That master braves a fight for the sake of …
Review: Richard III by Austin Drama Club
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 09, 2009
Julio Mella and the Austin Drama Club have translated Richard's evil into quaint modern terms -- modern, in that the early twentieth century setting is almost within living memory, and quaint, because the story mirrors popular fictions, further reinforced by the Godfather novels and movies.
He was standing at the gate when I walked up. East 7th and Concho. This looked like the place."Is this where the play is?"He looked me over. "Yeah. Go ahead. The house is open."Yes, it was open. And it was a house. Dark inside, with rough fabric curtains hanging between the entry and the kitchen, and then between the kitchen and the living area. Cooler this time, with an air conditioner laboring away in the …
Review: House of Several Stories by Imagine That Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 07, 2009
Boulanger's achievement both as playwright and director is that he starts with loud chaos, exaggeration and absurdity, and he gradually endows his characters and his story with humanity and depth.
Think Bart Simson meets Betty Crocker on LSD, with a confident cast and decisive playwright/director who steer a comedy of infantile, broken characters through ambiguous plots and overlapping time to crisis and a touching resolution. House of Several Stories, John Boulanger's MFA project at Texas State, had a reading at the university and played for just a flicker of time in early October, 2008 at the Blue Theatre in Austin. In April it won the …