Recent Reviews
Review: The Tempest by The Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 07, 2009
The light wanes, the river quiets, and the lighting shifts. Torches around the playing space and discreet amber lighting from high above convert the meadow into Prospero's domain.
The energy and the innovative staging of The Tempest by the Baron's Men go a long way toward overcoming the considerable disadvantages of their "green world" theatre."Castleton" lies in a narrow meadow along the lake, just west of the 360 bridge, and owner Richard Garriott has furnished it with quaint cabins, fancifully decorated. It reminded me very much of the "cabin camping" practiced in Scandinavia, where a family leases a tiny dwelling instead of pitching …
Review: House by Hyde Park Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 04, 2009
Very early and without a word Webster differentiates between his spectators. First are those who embrace the incongruities with delight -- the ones who yelp with short, delighted laughs.And then the others, with empathy, who sense the danger in this character.
Ken Webster's Victor is in control from the first instant of this piece. Lights dim and he flings open the doors to the theatre, entering to waves of recorded applause. Victor's expression is sardonic, dismissive, impatient. He gestures and cuts off the applause, then launches into a stream of consciousness monologue about group therapy. He is scathing, sarcastic, in control, telling us about the misfits and about the facilitator Just Call Me Joe -- "and …
Review: Sunday in the Park by Bastrop Opera House
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 29, 2009
These are the agreeable melodies you might find on player piano rolls or, once upon a time, in the yellowing music sheets inside Grandma's piano stool. The large cast performs them with affection, in a succesion of tableaus and skits without spoken dialogue.
Bastrop's serenely strolling musicale Sunday in the Park recalls that quaint Victorian device, the cardboard puppet theatre -- an elaborate dollhouse stage in which children could push forward stylized cardboard cutouts, imagining dialogue and story. In this production, Engela Edwards of Easy Theatre, Bastrop Opera's long-serving general director Chester Eitze and choreographer Laura Goff create for us a never-land version of an America small town, circa 1915. They draw on songbooks of the era, lightly …
Review: A Number by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 27, 2009
Churchill's texts are plosive monologues. Ideas and questions rush out out father and son, as each only half-listens to the other.
The concept of human cloning is profoundly unsettling.We like the fact each of us is unique. Individuality situates us in the universe and in our own skins. Each of us might fantasize a different reality or our self as a different individual, but we intuit that even those avatars, if realized, would be unique.The existence of fraternal twins or triplets is nature's benevolent random trick that reinforces our faith in our own individuality. Nature has …
Review: Buried Child by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 25, 2009
While creating these grotesques this cast and director show acute awareness of pacing, visible thought and reaction.They create whole characters and visible emotion, maintaining audience engagement in what otherwise might seem so incredible and farcical as to provoke laughter.
Sam Shephard's Buried Child gives such a strange, phantasmagoric world that one's first impulse might be to play it for laughs. In Shephard's introduction to the printed edition he speaks of revising the text for the 1995 Steppenwolf theatre company in Chicago and of director Gary Sinese's "instinct to push the characters and situation in an almost burlesque territory, which suddenly seemed right." At Southwestern University, director Jared J. Stein and his exemplary young ensemble …
Review: Leading Ladies by The Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 24, 2009
Many shenanigans, an engagement party with some impressively comic tango-dancing, changes of character and costume, and the deceiver deceiv'd -- Ken Ludwig is no Shakespeare, but we don't need high culture to have a good time with this script.
Leading Ladies by Ken Ludwig has all the big-footed clowning of a British pantomime, that venerable, wheezy holiday art form in which the British public hoots and chortles at manly men dressing up as women. Dame Edna is the royalty of that genre, but every middle- and lower-class family wants to attend the local "panto" in December, and British TV comedy sketches will inevitably get around to putting a male comedian into something frilly, and …