Reviews for City Theatre Company Performances
Review: Hamlet by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2009
City Theatre's Hamlet will carry you along its boisterous flow. Aaron Black is energetic and assertive, if not always very likeable. Destiny arrives at a gallop.
Director Jeff Hinkle and the City Theatre cast led by Aaron Black as Hamlet give us a gripping up-tempo version of the famous events in Elsinore. Elapsed playing time from the first challenge on the battlements to Hamlet's dying gasp, "The rest -- is silence" is just a little more than two and a half hours. That fits the play well within the max bounds for today's young movie-going public and gives them the bonus of a …
Review: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 27, 2009
The production rattles along so quickly that in order to appreciate it, one would need to know the story already -- for example, the reason that we find them in the countryside at the quirky professor's house.
Director Bridget Farias and her cast have put together a jolly version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, with loving attention to the eccentricities of Narnia creatures. Audiences will enjoy the glim from the 2005 film version produced by Disney, which was the best selling DVD in 2006, but both that film and this script follow closely the novel for children written by C.S. Lewis in 1949.When this production was announced through ALT, one parent, …
Review: Tartuffe by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 29, 2009
Why the slow start, overcome so smartly by the successive revelations of the second half? In my view, it's a question of language, prose vs. verse, and different acting styles.
Molière was appalled and distressed when he learned that although Louis XIV had enjoyed the court performance of Tartuffe on May 12, 1664 the "Sun King" had listened to pious advisers and had forbidden any further presentations of the play. This great comic tale of religious hypocrisy was in trouble from the start. The dramatist had produced a farce in elegant verse featuring a "holy man" intent on seduction, theft and exploitation, an adroit manipulator of religious concepts …
Review: Nunsense by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 16, 2009
McAtee has won our hearts by then, so she can play dizzy misadventure of the very pure Reverend Mom with clever wonder and a great build of physical comedy.
This saucy, sparkling production of a popular favorite plays merrily with its basic premise: even if you're very, very good, you can laugh and dance to the joy of life. Dan Goggin's idea is so simple that it started out as a line of greeting cards. Their immediate popularity prompted him to put his mischievous nuns on stage. He reworked a warmly received trial run (of 38 weeks!) into a longer piece that opened off …
Review: The Heidi Chronicles by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 29, 2009
Wasserstein recalls shared moments and attitudes of the baby boom generation, making merciless fun of them; at the same time she presents us with characters wrapped in loneliness as they achieve career success.
Wendy Wasserstein, playwright of The Heidi Chronicles, died in 2005, cut down in full artistic activity by lymphoma. Her play Third, which premiered that year, was performed in Austin last September by the Paradox Players. The City Theatre has just opened The Heidi Chronicles for a four-week run, featuring a talented young cast, clever staging and some still unanswered big questions. One of five children of a wealthy Jewish family in Brooklyn, Wasserstein graduated from Mount Holyoke, then obtained master's …
Review: Fences by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 01, 2009
This father-son relationship is as tense and dangerous as a live wire. The casting here is superb and the duo scenes are riveting.
The City Theatre production of August Wilson's Fences is powerful, intelligent, deep, universal and fully realized. It is by far the most impressive modern drama staged to date in this Austin theatre season. This is theatre not to be missed.The year is 1957, but it could be any time in history. The place is a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, like that in which August Wilson grew up, but it could be any close-knit community. August Wilson has …