Recent Reviews
Review: Tartuffe by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 29, 2009
Why the slow start, overcome so smartly by the successive revelations of the second half? In my view, it's a question of language, prose vs. verse, and different acting styles.
Molière was appalled and distressed when he learned that although Louis XIV had enjoyed the court performance of Tartuffe on May 12, 1664 the "Sun King" had listened to pious advisers and had forbidden any further presentations of the play. This great comic tale of religious hypocrisy was in trouble from the start. The dramatist had produced a farce in elegant verse featuring a "holy man" intent on seduction, theft and exploitation, an adroit manipulator …
Review: A Life in the Theatre by Tongue and Groove Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 29, 2009
There's a duff sentimentality in much of this, and it arises from the cluelessness that Michael Stuart gives to the gradually failing older actor.
With David Mamet's name on the playbill, one expects edgy situations and sharp language, but this production of A Life in the Theatre was one of gentle comedy and smooth edges. It's a two-man show in which we see two male actors in an unnamed fifth-rate theatrical company sharing a dressing room. Michael Stuart is the mature actor and Zeb West is the newcomer. Mamet gives us vignettes of them over the stretch of a …
Review: The Men from Mars AND Clever as Mice by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 28, 2009
But seriously, folks, as the stand-up comedians used to say in vaudeville. . . Manning has an idea here, but his script is too slow, too long, and too unexplained. We in the audience were ready to play along, if only we could have understood the motivation.
Ryan Manning provided a lot of the energy for the Austin Community College Experimental Student Performance Lab. This summer 2009 enterprise put on four pieces, all student-written and student-directed, all performed by ACC students. Manning wrote three of them and performed in three. Whatever ESPL show was up there, Manning was an important part of it.Bravo for that energy and engagement. Austin Live Theatre published a review of Manning's "Beckett" piece An Empty Stage on …
Review: Love Me AND An Empty Stage by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 25, 2009
A Twitter resumé might read, "Crippled and haunted by war, great suffering artist Oskar is jilted by Alma Mahler; falls for life-size surrogate doll, destroys it at orgy."
Austin Community College's summer 2009 Experimental Student Performance Lab got off to a good start for me with Philip Kreyche's expressionistic two-act work Love Me, preceded by Ryan Manning's whimsical curtain-raiser The Empty Stage. Manning's short piece gives us Dani Miller as "Pye, the Man with No Memory," and Manning himself as "Que, The Man Who Reminds Him." Imagine Estragon and Vladimir, respectively, except that instead of waiting for Godot, they're trying to construct a …
Review: Rabbit Hole by Dancing Cat Circle
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 14, 2009
This is a delicate exploration of grief and healing, poignant and sometimes comic. Rachel McGinnis as Becca is subtle, perceptive, at times luminescent.
Rabbit Hole by David Linday-Abaires is a quiet play about loss. Becca and Howie were young parents six months ago when a swift series of random events sent their four-year-old son Danny running after his dog, just as a teenager drove down the street going maybe just a tiny bit too fast.That back story is not shoved into your face. The action opens as Becca's loud, impulsive sister Izzy is sitting at Becca's kitchen table, …
Review: An Inspector Calls by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 11, 2009
Peters' Inspector Goole is properly spectral in aspect, conduct and reproach. He unleashes a moral questioning in this milieu, one that remains alive more with some -- the young and previously thoughtless Sheila, for one -- than with others.
Under the artistic direction of Norman Blumensaadt, Different Stages and its predecessor the Small Potatoes Theatre Company have furnished Austin Theatre with a considerable library of stage work. The back page of the program for An Inspector Calls lists 109 productions the company has brought to the boards since 1981.Different Stages has given the city a good dose of the classics and a wide array of works from the British and European stages. The company …