Reviews for The Baron's Men Performances
Review: As You Like It by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 20, 2017
If you haven't made it out to the forest of Arden on the banks of the Colorado just twenty minutes from downtown, you should do penance. Or, better, get thee hence and hie thee thither. There's nothing remotely like it elsewhere in Central Texas.
The Baron's Men's staging of As You Like It is indeed just as Shakespeare aficionados like it. Of course there's the timbered Curtain Theatre, a tidy recreation of the half "O" of Elizabethan theatre, and there's the costume eye candy from Liegh Hegedus aided by Dawn Allee and her busy stitchery fairies. But more than anything there's the play itself, Shakespeare's whimsical tale of two aristocratic maidens running off to the magical forest of Arden where …
Review: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 17, 2016
The real mystery in the TRAGICAL HISTORY is Doctor Faustus' failure to repent. Casey Jones as a vivid Mephistopheles is more familiar and immediate than the distant God who could save Faustus.
You're in a Halloween sort of mood? Then the Baron's Men's production of Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is for you. The legend of the learned man who sold his soul to Mephistopheles in return for 24 years of worldly power and exhaltation is a deeply tragic tale, one that deftly symbolizes our perpetual longing for more in this present life -- more things, more scope and more experiences. In fact, playwright …
Review: The Lark by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 11, 2016
Anouilh admonishes that you cannot explain Joan, any more than you can explain the tiniest flower growing by the wayside.
With a decade of public performances of Elizabethan and early modern theatre behind them, the Baron's Men offer an adroit and subtle change of mode at the lakeside Elizabethan-style Curtain Theatre. The Lark is a costume drama, richly draped, and it's set in 1430, the period exactly contemporaneous with the settings of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays. It shares a principal character with them: Joan of Arc, the maid of Orleans who rose from peasant obscurity to …
Review: Richard III by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 19, 2016
Andy Bond's casual mastery of Shakespearian verse is a treat. His delivery as Richard III is strikingly low key and has the charm of apparent spontaneity.
The Baron's Men company in Austin got started as a lark in 1997, when a group of friends inspired by the Society for Creative Anachronism put together a twenty-minute version of Henry V. They went on to perform occasional Shakespeare on portable platforms until in 2005 tech magnate Richard Garriot offered to put up an Elizabethan-style stage on his waterfront property. He was serious about it. Construction was sturdy, and capacity of the two covered …
Review: Much Ado About Nothing by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 05, 2015
In this sprightly production the transformation of the sullen Don John into Dona Giovanna (Leanne Holmquist) is deft, apt, clear and powerful.
"Twenty-one productions in thirteen years!" director Monette Mueller informed opening-night spectators gathered before the torch-lit boards of the Curtain Theatre. The Baron's Men first performed in October, 2002 on a makeshift stage erected that very day. Their patron Richard Garriott later had a tidy Elizabethan-style stage erected for them on the north bank of the Colorado River, just west of the 360 bridge, and they've explored Shakespeare and other authors of early modern drama in …
Review: Lysistrata by The Baron's Men
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 13, 2014
Aristophane’s Lysistrata is the world’s first anti-war play, and it is not produced often enough in the modern world for us to learn its lessons. It is also a play about love, with a lot of kissing, hugging, nuzzling, and feeding each other grapes. This is somewhat ccounter to its theme, but, eh, the play has its complexities. The Baron’s Men give it a lusty go at Richard Garriott’s The Curtain Theatre in far west Austin. The …