Reviews for Different Stages Performances
Review: Well by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 18, 2011
Jennifer Underwood is that rare bird, the experienced actress who radiates such wisdom and warmth that she makes you long for a big hug, a cup of herbal tea and a long afternoon chat in the homey mess that's her living room.
This mischievous comedy deserves a better title. By calling it Well, Lisa Kron implies that it's about exactly the opposite: about illness. That subliminal message is reinforced in Different Stages' press releases. Even an impish twist of punctuation would have done it. Call it Well? so as to capture the mother-daughter dialogue at the heart of the play, in which monologist Lisa Kron pushes beyond the strictures of stand-up comedy and tale-telling, confiding to the audience that …
Review: Too Many Husbands by Different Stages
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on June 27, 2011
Martina Ohlhauser breathes life into a potentially two-dimensional character. She is charming as she whines, enticing as she lies, and entertaining as she grandstands about her own constant self-sacrifice.
Too Many Laughs The program for Different Stages’ production of Too Many Husbands provides a page-long biography of the author, W. Somerset Maugham, best remembered today as a novelist. Here one may learn that Maugham worked as an obstetrician in the slums of London, joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver at the age of forty and went on to become a secret service agent for British Military Intelligence. This is perhaps to inject a …
Review: Humble Boy by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 18, 2011
Playwright Jones creates vivid characters and director Jonathan Urso runs them through amusing clashes and quirky incidents, including a grimly funny series of missteps with the ashes of the late lamented James Humble.
Tom Stephan is a revelation in Different Stages' Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones, playing through the end of the month at the City Theatre. In Austin Shakespeare's production of The Tempest last September he was a dismayed and battered King Alonso of Naples, cast ashore in the opening scene and awkwardly penitent in Act V. Here, as Felix Humble, the title character of Jones' sardonic social comedy, Stephan is vividly alive, so inventive and subtle of gesture and …
Review: Morning's at Seven by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 26, 2010
Five strong, distinctive women actors play against four equally vivid men, and not a one of them is in years of the ardent twenty-somethings so familiar in this town.
Different Stages lives up to its name with this affectionate recreation of a vanished America. Paul Osborn created for his 1930's audiences a comforting family portrait, set in a small town. All three acts of Morning's at Seven take place in a back yard shared by two wooden frame houses. All except one of the nine characters are related. This gentle comedy was a quirky oldies play. All four of the Boulton sisters are in their …
Review: Spider's Web by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 09, 2010
We enjoy Clarissa's elaborate persuasion and pretending, as well as the cover story's eventual collapse under investigation. The cat and mouse game is not between criminal and detective but rather between a spontaneous fantasizer and the minions of the law.
You don't see much of Agatha Christie in the United States any more, except perhaps in public libraries and the occasional revival of one of her many plays. Airport newstands rarely offer murder as genteel puzzle any more, instead stacking up thick paperbacks with vibrant covers, done by Clive Custler or Sue Grafton or any of a number of other contemporary producers of blockbusters. Different Stages does us a service by providing an accomplished …
Review: The Carpetbagger's Children by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 24, 2010
Ever present in the story is the land itself, the Estate that produces the revenue supplied to the good sisters and denied during Father's lifetime to the single bad seed. Family endures; the Estate lasts.
The Carpetbagger's Children, staged in 2005, was the penultimate of the Texas playwright's dramas, the next-to-the-last of from 40 (according to Wikipedia) to more than 60 (according to the New York Times). Like many of his dramas, it is set in the mythical town of Harrison, Texas, based on his birthplace Wharton, a crossroads southwest of Houston. Foote's final play was, aptly enough, a reworking of his earlier Dividing The Estate. He died last year at …