Reviews for City Theatre Company Performances
Review: Bus Stop by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 31, 2016
You've seen this kind of setup hundreds of times: the playwright collects characters and sets them spinning and bouncing off one another.
William Inge's Bus Stop sets for its audience the classic 'closed room' story, except that it's not an Agatha-Christie style mystery. The mystery being pursued here is the quest for love. It's 1 a.m. in the morning at a crossroads cafe somewhere west of Kansas City, well before the age of the Interstates. Cafe proprietor Grace and her young teen waitress are waiting for the arrival of the night bus, and taciturn Sheriff Will is …
Review: A Man for All Seasons by City Theatre Company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on March 05, 2016
When Norfolk tries to understand Thomas More's stance, he's thwarted by the simple line, "I trust I have made myself obscure." Yet the truth couldn't be farther from this gibe.
A Season for a Fall It’s good to be king, as the saying goes, you have absolute power and most of your desires are readily fulfilled. Everyone loves you, or at least they pretend to. . . ahhh, there's the rub. The pandering sycophants and your truest friends are forced by fear of the executioner’s axe to be pretty much one and the same. An honest opinion is hard to find. This is why …
Review: The Boys Next Door by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 29, 2016
We in the audience leave the City Theatre somewhat lightened and enlightened by the chuckles of our evening with the boys next door.
Tom Griffith's 1986 comedy The Boys Next Door is a classic -- a light classic, granted, somewhat more like the fare featured at Houston's KUHA than that at Austin's generally more brainy KMFA. This adroitly scripted tale of a group home for four variously mentally handicapped men is a staple of community theatres (3500 productions so far and counting) but unlike other similarly popular works of light stage comedy, it hasn't been turned into a …
Review: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 04, 2015
Michael Clnkscales has the quiver and rubber-faced grimaces for Pseudolus the tricky slave, but he also has a bounding physical energy. Jeff Philips as Hysterium the major domo is a fine deliberate distrustful foil. The two work together with the familiar ease of a vaudeville duo.
City Theatre's staging of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Foreum has all the cheery exuberance and somewhat retro fun of a toga party at a frat house -- do the on-campus Greeks do that anymore, or has such innocent naughtiness disappeared in today's overload of digital ersatz sophistication? If so, too bad for them; this evening of capers led by R. Michael Clinkscales is merrily nonsensical, a Sondheim/Shevelove/Gelbart celebration of the 'tricky slave' rom-coms …
Review: Love! Valour! Compassion! by City Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 10, 2015
All these characters have immense heart, even if some are less revealing than others; this quality makes this play a mighty work that speaks to the human condition to a degree perhaps greater than any other play of the last twenty years.
City Theatre has, once again, proved itself a leader on the Austin east side theatre scene. Love! Valour! Compassion!, is a production second to none -- Off-Broadway or anywhere where. Expectations in the Austin theatre community for Terence McNally’s play were sky-high. It won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1995 and other awards, and City Theatre has made itself a reputation of including bold and meaningful modern dramas in its agreeably diverse programing. …
Review: The Importance of Being Earnest by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 28, 2015
Kara Bliss's Lady Bracknell has just the right no-nonsense insistence along with the humorlessness that makes the character so comic.
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is so exquisitely written that it will probably never fall out of fashion. Wilde mocks fashion and the fashionable; he presents us with chaps who are guileful but goodhearted deceivers and young ladies dizzy with self importance and good manners. And of course there's Aunt Agatha, the ultimate dragon lady, arbiter of all that's good taste and acceptable in polite society. The script is balanced, well plotted, …