Recent Reviews
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Review: Little Women, the Broadway musical by The Public Theater
by Kurt Gardner
Published on February 01, 2018
Definitely working in this production’s favor is the Public’s splendid staging. Director Andy Meyers smartly puts an emphasis on the frequent comedic one-liners, which kept the audience chuckling appreciatively on opening night.
The 2005 adaptation of Little Women is the latest attempt to musicalize Louisa May Alcott’s classic, following a 1958 television version and a 1998 opera. In order to insert about 18 numbers (and a handful of reprises) into the story, Alan Knee’s book streamlines the plot and provides quick sketches of the characters. That’s not a problem, as most audiences are familiar enough with this 150-year-old classic to follow along. However, many of Jason Howland …
Review: 893/Ya-Ku-Za by Vortex Repertory Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2018
There's a great deal of watchful waiting in the dialogue between these two characters, so much so that I found myself imagining this piece as a Japanese film in black-and-white, framed principally in closeups
The Generic Ensemble Company (GenEnCo) has mounted a starkly simple set on the Vortex Rep's inside stage, representing a private room in a Japanese restaurant or teahouse: sliding bamboo-and-paper partitions, mats, a low table and two cushions. By containing the hour-long performance of 893 YA-KU-ZA in this plain space, they're playing an evocative, reductionist game. Mia King and kt shorb meet here in an atmosphere of tense threat. King is Aya, female martial arts warrior; …
Review: The Giver by TILT Performance Group
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 27, 2018
Levels of gentle irony were at work in TILT's staging of THE GIVER, both in the story and in the use of actors, some of them differently abled, to present the complexity of difference.
Adam Roberts' staging of The Giver, a 2006 adaptation by Eric Coble of Lowis Lowry's famous YA novel, is a gentle, extended exercise in complicit irony. It's a clever pivot for the four-year-old TILT Performance Group, founded by Roberts and others to open the world of theatrical performance to actors, principally young, afflicted by physical disadvantages. TILT showed their families and the rest of us that those participants are just as capable as any of …
Review: Strip by FronteraFest
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 26, 2018
An impressive multimedia blitz of live music expertly performed, dance and video, STRIP succeeds in its triple focus on tumultuous, tragic lives of often overlooked, almost closeted twentieth-century performers Candy Barr, Lenny Bruce and Josephine Baker.
Strip, the Musical is a showcase of the old Austin performance community, revolving around the central figure of Amparo Garcia-Crow, who's the producer, director, and writer of this huge independent show. As one of a talented group of UT-Austin drama students in the 1980s, Garcia-Crow launched a lifelong national performance career of multimedia, multimodal performances that defied characterization as only music, only theatre, or only dance.Her motto seemed to be “all of this, and more.” …
Review: If I Forget by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 22, 2018
Confessions and quandries, the testing of ties that bind: siblilngs who curse one another four times over and then lapse into shared memories of better times. Every second of IF I FORGET is gripping.
For the second time in just a few months an Austin theatre company has scooped a powerful drama out of the big city theatre biosphere and mounted an accomplished staging that proves the script universal instead of big-city provincial. In September Hyde Park Theatre did it with Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves, and now Southwest Theatre Productions delivers Steven Levenson's powerful and closely plotted If I Forget as its seventh production since it was founded in …
Review #2 of 2: Uncle Vanya by City Theatre Company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on January 18, 2018
The brilliance of director Rod Mechem's production is that even when the characters believe they have nothing to live for, the actors' performances show us they're lying to themselves.
There are many things you can say about Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya that would be an understatement. For example: It is about characters going through their own and very different mid-life crises. It is an existential commentary on social classes in mid-19th century Russia. It explores the exploitive relationship between people and the environment. It illustrates the dangerous self-delusions created variously by academia, alcohol abuse and religion. The timelessness of this work is not because …