Recent Reviews
Review: Cul-de-Sac by Summer Break Theatre
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on July 22, 2019
CUL-DE-SAC is billed as a comedy, which provides it the shield of satire, but watching these characters flounder made one feel like a mischievous but indifferent kid observing ants through a magnifying glass.
It somehow seems that a cul-de-sac is less sinister than a dead-end street, though in truth they are the essentially the same thing. Sure, a cul-de-sac implies a circular dead end that makes turning the car around or escaping, if you will, much easier. Cul-de-sac translates directly from the French as ‘bottom of the bag’ which may also sound negative if you interpret an empty bag or sack as containing nothing. Or, more to the …
Review: The Tempest by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 20, 2019
George Kendall's cool Prospero sets up the arc of his own seeming success. The magician could be perceived as the dealer who has stacked the cards, while Surgener's Caliban, an expressive but desperate loser, could be the protagonist in quite a different story.
The Tempest never disappoints. Perhaps this late play was indeed Shakespeare's farewell to the stage. That view is probably just sentimental pudding, for he was a working playwright, popular but not really idolized until after he'd been gone for a while. But this fantasy on an enchanted isle is easy to swallow, for Shakespeare gives us the magician, the magic, and the fairy sprite yearning to be free, just as exiled Duke of Milan Prospero …
Review: Confessions of a Mexpatriate by Teatro Audaz
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 14, 2019
Mical Trejo provides an impressive performance of a discouraging phenomenon: a man who is an American, one hundred percent, but who has embraced the myth that he really should be someone else.
I missed Confessions of a Mexpatriate by Raul Garza last year at Austin's Hyde Park Theatre, so I welcomed the opportunity to visit the cellar theatre at San Antonio's Public Theatre, where Teatro Audaz was presenting it for the July 4 weekend. That timing seemed appropriate; Garza's piece, appreciated in Austin and already performed elsewhere in the U.S. since that time, has as its focus the psychic dilemma of Americans keenly aware of family origins …
Review: A Doll's House by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 02, 2019
Hendrik Ibsen, that canny old plot spinner, packs a lot into his story, and Catherine Williams brings protagonist Nora Helmer vividly alive.
Attending The Doll's House by Ibsen by Austin's Different Stages, I couldn't help but think of the American music hall ballad She's Only A Bird in a Gilded Cage, a sentimental portrait of a woman who married for money, not for love. Ann Marie Gordon's set in the Trinity Street Players' black box theatre subtly suggests just such a cage. At the center of this famously intimate space stand the furnishings of a solid middle-class …
Review: Miss Murder by Blunt Force Drama
by Justin M. West
Published on June 28, 2019
MISS MURDER, a series of monologues from some of the vilest women to have lived, is a solid first outing, one that's mostly positive but curiously hard to decipher thematically.
“I’m not an animal,” says Aileen Wuornos (Kelsey Vanderstine). Frantically, she wants us to understand her plight. She’s been convicted of brutally slaying seven men in less than a year and vents to us from death row, pacing and scanning the faces around her to make sure we’re paying attention. “I’m not an animal,” she says. She lets that sink in before slumping into her seat with folded arms, shielding her body and turning her …
Review: Outside Mullingar by Reverie Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 25, 2019
Two families exist in a stark landscape of the mind where the land and tradition predominate. A father and son; a recent widow; a spinster daughter. Only about once a season do we get a production of this depth, intimacy and autheticity. Go see it.
Two points: 1. Go see Outside Mullingar. Only about once a season do we get a production of this depth, intimacy and autheticity. There's only one weekend left and seats are scarce. The Mastrogeorge Theatre, part of the Carol Hickey acting studio, just behind Blue Owl Brewing at E. Cesar Chavez and Pedernales, is a small space with limited makeshift seating. 2. And when you do, get there ahead of time. The place holds only …