Recent Reviews
Review: This Side of the Dirt by Tito Beveridge
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 03, 2016
The playwright attempts to do a ighthearted treatment of family life in South Texas. Think 'Dallas' with character comedy. The result is closer to a very unfunny 'Beverly Hillbillies.'
The audience arriving in the black box theatre at the Dougherty Arts Center is treated to Donnie Stroud's marvelous slide show of Old West images from pastel postcards and hand-tinted photos from the early twentieth century. A few notes on This Side of the Dirt by Tito Beveridge, which follows: The two characters with whom we spend most of our time are both women. Jonna Juul-Hansen is Jean Ann, the middle-aged heiress of this South …
You’ve Got to Behave: An Analysis of Capital T’s production of TREVOR
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on June 02, 2016
Trevor has hope and faith and keeps dealing with the simple-minded humans because he knows his day will come. Because America loves an underdog.
“Humor is tragedy plus time,” or is it “Comedy is tragedy plus time,” or is it “Tragedy plus time equals Comedy?” This old witticism has been attributed to many different personalities including Carol Burnett, Steve Allen and Mark Twain. I suspect, however, that the basic truth behind this observation is much older than all three of these potential sources. Trevor by Nick Jones is a comedic adaptation of a tragic event that occurred on February …
Review: Clybourne Park by Penfold Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 30, 2016
Penfold Theatre's staging is superlative, off the top of any scale you might use to rate this important and fiercely relevant work of theatre art.
Plays and performances are complex works of art, and the impact upon those watching even the same staging may be wildly different. That's why I chose very early on -- eight years ago -- not to resort to inevitably misleading numerical rating scales in these reviews. One man's meat is another man's poison, of course, but more importantly, a reductive number is just as misleading as a dutiful standing ovation delivered by friends of the …
Review: The Hotel Vanya, or A Metaphysical-Paradigm At The End of Everythingness by Timothy Braun and Natalie George Productions
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 29, 2016
The superb cast is the primary virtue of THE HOTEL VANYA, Timothy Braun's strongly metatheatrical quasi-Chekhovian work about bleak endings.
The promotional material for The Hotel Vanya, or A Metaphysical Paradigm At The End Of Everythingness promises a wide range of story glimpses for audiences, like the individual objects in a Dali painting or scenes in a Fellini movie. The promise is fulfilled, with slightly less color, in the dusty warehouse where the play is performed, but what the publicity does not say is that the play is the newest original theatrical production in regional …
Review: Notes on the Classification of Spectral Lines, the Art of Water Writing, and Other Important Ephemera by Catastrophe Theory Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 26, 2016
An entirely opaque title hides a sequence of exploratory performances that produce something expected, surprise and delight.
The title is entirely opaque. It's a curious choice by Stephen Pruitt and Rebecca Whitehurst for the succession of illuminating thought pieces they assembled with great care for a single weekend presentation at the Salvage Vanguard. The Tuesday preview audience could have been met by just about anything, from astrophysics to hoodoo. And in fact, we were. A miscellany. This short evening somewhat resembles a sequence of TED talks that you might have turned up …
Review: One Man, Two Guvnors by Vexler Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 24, 2016
The script is boffo squared because Bean takes the absurd clowning of Goldoni's 1743 Commedia dell'Arte staple with stock characters and multiplies it by British panto, the broad vaudeville style that persists to this day.
This is sure-fire comic material. If you're puzzled by the slangy English title, you need only note that One Man, Two Guvnors is playing now at The Vexler Theatre in San Antonio and opens next week at the Zach Theatre in Austin. Richard Bean's cheeky adaptation of The Servant of Two Masters by Goldoni has flashed from its 2011 London opening to multiple UK tours to Broadway to our eager colonial hinterland in just five …