Reviews for Different Stages Performances
Review by Brian Paul Scipione (#1 of 3): FALLEN ANGELS by Noël Coward, Different Stages, January 8 - 30, 2016
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on January 13, 2016
The comedic tension Different Stages' Fallen Angels has the riveting frenetic pace of a Wimbledon tennis match. Cheers to this production.
Martinis, Champagne and the Requisite Amount of Passion “Don’t be young Jane!” Rebecca Robinson as Julia Sterroll shoots out icily at her longtime friend (both in and out of character) Emily Erington as Jane Banbury. In other words, be mature, respectable and a proper English wife: a task neither of them achieve after the first ten minutes of the play. They are the titular Fallen Angels of Noel Coward’s classic (and very controversial at …
Review: Dracula by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 28, 2015
For those like my sixth-grade friend Charlie who take Stoker and Shelly as serious as the Kabbala, this one's a must-see.
I met -- and avoided -- Dracula at an early age. Mly sixth-grade friend Charlie was fascinated by the classic narratives of Gothic horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He pressed them upon me, but their quaint and creepy 19th century style was too much. Reading their prose was like pulling a dust-laden velvet curtain back to look for a corpse in a coffin. Later I absorbed the 'horror movie' images of both, comfortingly comical, …
Review: When The Rain Stops Falling by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 08, 2015
The playwright, director and cast achieve something beyond mere storytelling. They touch our emotions deeply and evoke the biggest questions and mysterious interconnections of human life.
Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling is an extraordinary piece of writing. Norman Blumensaadt's staging of it at the Vortex is an astonishing feat of theatre. This is a far journey into a mystery and into unknowing: there's a puzzle to be unravelled at the core of it, but the real puzzle is the arbitrary and capricious nature of our very existence. Does that sound obscure? These interconnected stories of four generations span …
Review: Charley's Aunt by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 31, 2015
Farces about courting and deception have a fine long history, for what's more amusing that the earnest efforts of the young to wriggle around the constraining conventions of society?
Norman Blumensaadt, artistic director of Different Stages, has over the past 34 years provided a continuing anthology of the theatre, the living equivalent of that imposing row of books in public libraries, The Best Plays of [year]. The series on American dramas ran from the 1930's to 1993 as founding editor John Gasner was replaced by Clive Barnes. Blumensaadt's reach is wider and, if anything, more determined. The Different Stages programs list them all, …
Review: Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck, Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 19, 2015
Different Stages' production of Mauritius is a crackerjack film noir, up close, live and in color.
Different Stages' production of Mauritius is a crackerjack film noir, up close, live and in color. Although there are three playing areas cursorily defined by Ann Marie Gordon's set on the City Theatre stage and the director chooses at times to leave two of them inhabited, the impression created by the clash of competing interests is that it's all taking place in one room. Perhaps in the claustrophobic room of the …
Review: Pygmalion by Different Stages
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 09, 2014
Different Stages’ production of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion at the Vortex in East Austin is low on the radar in this summer of spectacular productions, but theatergoers should search out this classic play, updated and made fresh as the violets in Eliza Doolittle’s basket by Director Norman Blumensaadt. Different Stages has much to be proud of, at most levels, in this new production of an older and well-known play. The play derives ultimately from the Greek …