Recent Reviews
Review: Company by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 17, 2008
Furth and Sondheim were certainly enamored of the ladies, though. Each of the eight women actors of the piece is striking, talented, and has at least one juicy scene.
Academics have labeled Stephen Sondheim’s Company a “conceptual musical,” an exploration of the dilemmas and discontents of urban marriage and of unattached bachelorhood.When it opened in 1970, Broadway audiences were used to plot, plot and character, reflected and stitched together in song. Company, with a book by actor George Furth and words & music by Sondheim, is instead a series of vignettes around the unattached bachelor Robert, living in New York City and facing his …
Review: Dug Up by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 13, 2008
A negligée-clad long-stay tourist Marci (Liz Fisher), may have murdered her husband. Mix in a storm that may or may not be a hurricane, various clean-picked skeletons of small animals, and a larger bone that looks disturbingly like a human femur.
This show will fill the bill if you are looking for spooky entertainment for this Halloween season.Director Laura Toner and Austin playwright Cyndi Williams tell us, “Dug Up was inspired by the stories of post-Katrina New Orleans, her personal experience driving through the Louisiana bayou, the idea of Tennessee Williams writing a ghost story, and stories from her own childhood. Dug Up exists though in its own world, slightly out of time and reality. The …
Review: Always, Patsy Cline, by Tex-Arts Lakeway
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 11, 2008
Playwright Ted Swindley weaves two very different strands for this presentation. The manic Louise, a clown of little insight, provides the narrative and the jokes. And Patsy sings.
Selena Rosanbalm is a great big bundle of vocal talent.She delivered again and again in the TexArts’ production of Always, Patsy Cline, blending with our memories of Patsy’s joy, melancholy, honky-tonk and hokum from the late 1950s and early 1960s.That was the time when that plucky little singer with the vibrant voice traveled from town to dusty town, earning her coins with a different band every night instead of staying in Nashville and watching the …
Review of Proof, by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 11, 2008
Tuck softens Catherine, giving her at times the self-absorbed lassitude of the truly lost. We never share her expressed apprehension that she might be tipping over into madness, as her father did.
This is a beautifully engineered production with a high level of acting, and it deserves to be seen beyond the purely internal circuit of Austin Community College.It plays this weekend and next at the tiny third-floor Gallery Theatre at ACC’s Rio Grande campus, in the building that once upon a time was Stephen F. Austin High School.It occurred to me as I watched the play unfold on opening night that I was probably the only …
Review: The Nauseous Fairy
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 07, 2008
Rather than a story, this is a short submersion in magic. It’s a fine Halloween goody.
This is a trifle, but it is a delicious one. Or more accurately and using further food analogies, it could serve best as an antipasto or an amuse-bouche, a light and diverting treat preliminary to a Halloween season meal. The Nauseous Fairy is a twenty-minute puppetry experience at the newly installed home in East Austin of Geppetto Dreams Puppet Company.Geppetto himself (Ricki Vincent) and 5 unseen collaborators bring to life a vivid goblins’ garden for …
Review: Glengarry, Glen Ross
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 05, 2008
Noxious winner Roma and the over-the-hill Levene, seeking a comeback, are Janus faces of the American Salesman.
The title doesn’t tell you what to expect.The grim black and white poster image of bound hands is purely symbolic, because you aren‘t going to see anyone tied up or physically abused in this play.The violence here is verbal and psychic, couched in strong male language common in everyday life but raw and powerful on stage. Mamet gives us a world of men locked in economic competition, where unscrupulous winners get privileges and hard-pressed losers …