Reviews for Austin Shakespeare Performances
Review: Shakespeare's Husbands and Wives by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 01, 2010
You can slice Shakespeare all sorts of ways, and unless you're doing it with malice aforethought, the text is, in the end, still Shakespeare. Jill K. Swanson has dug out some of the juicy bits and given them to folks who know how to act them.
In this diverse fast-food town you can even get tasty Bard bits in a quick drive-by. No carry-outs, other than the program for Shakespeare's Husbands & Wives, but you're assured of comfortable seating and a varied menu at a session only 40 minutes in length. This Wednesday through Friday only, at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road, for the modest contribution of $10.Jill K. Swanson has appeared often on Austin stages over the past dozen years, and …
Review: Mary Stuart by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 14, 2010
But this evening in that haunting space belongs entirely to the queens. Helen Merino as Mary Stuart and Pamela Christian as Elizabeth are foes and yet so alike -- as Schiller reminds us when Elizabeth snaps bitterly at the kneeling Mary, "I could have easily been in your place."
Mary Stuart in Austin Shakespeare's staging at the Rollins Theatre provides a powerful, cathartic experience for the spectator. Schiller's drama gives us two sixteenth-century queens, each with a claim to the English throne, wrapped in tangled interests of state and church, trapped together like scorpions in a bottle and surrounded by plotters, counselors, and mendacity. This Mary Stuart plays like Shakespeare, with actors in stylized Elizabethan garb moving in a long court laid between ranks of spectators. Director Ann …
Review: World's Fastest Hamlet 2009 by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 09, 2010
This show was the ridiculous happily distilled from the sublime. In a sense, Austin Shakespeare company members were parodying themselves and the whole enterprise of acting.
Austin Shakespeare winked at the bard and happily laughed at itself with The World's Fastest Hamlet, a twenty-minute show given its second (annual?) staging at First Night Austin, the December 31 downtown festival.Last year the same four-actor cast performed twice under the First Street Bridge during a bright, mild afternoon. This year they briefly took the music stage at City Hall Plaza at 6:15 p.m. as dark fell and the First Night parade unwound behind them along the …
Review: Measure for Measure by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 15, 2009
The opening is a quick glimpse into a late night dive, with hectic ragtime music accompanying jazz babies and half-clad clients dancing in colored spotlights. That wordless surging tableau clears away and we find the Duke, Savannah's ruler, with cardboard suitcase packed.
Austin Shakespeare's Measure for Measure can offer you a good time. It has a dramatic intrigue, lots of clowning, a clever time-warp setting in Savannah, Georgia of the 1920s and a cast that I'd be happy to put up against any other American Shakespeare company out there.At the same time that he's entertaining us, Shakespeare is working some much deeper themes. These include the responsibility of authority; chastity, promiscuity, desire and disease; the role of the state …
Review: Romeo and Juliet by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 10, 2009
Director Ciccolella freezes the quinceañera in mid-dance for their mutual courting and first two kisses. They have stepped out of the flow of time, just as they have stepped out of the bounds of convention.
The Romeo and Juliet playing this month in Zilker Park is a perfect evening of summer Shakespeare. A play we all know, streamlined, given an apt and intriguing twist, with a production outdoors. The Sheffield Theatre is in fact just a stage situated below a bowl-shaped meadow. We the spectators are invited to sprawl on our blankets or bring our own folding chairs. The stage is wide, the players are amplified, and the full moon …
Review: An Ideal Husband by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 14, 2009
Wilde has a message -- approximately, "We men adore women for their imperfections but you women will insist on putting your men on a pedestal, obliged to perfection."
The conventional staging of Oscar Wilde, within the frame of a proscenium, gives us a bright window into the highly mannered scene of London's Victorian upper classes.For Austin Shakespeare's An Ideal Husband in the Long Center's Rollins Theatre, the audience surrounds the stage. This staging in-the-square gives us a visual kaleidoscope of witty epigrams, paradoxes, brilliant costumes and exquisitely good manners. There's a technical challenge here, since at any given moment an actor will be standing with …