Reviews for Gaslight Baker Theatre Performances
Review: The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 01, 2009
The title of Brown's piece is misleading, for Scrooge is the plaintiff. Gary Yowell, stiff in his sideburns and scroogely disappointment, is pursuing damages for mistreatment, kidnapping, and personal humiliation.
Ebenezer Scrooge is everywhere around Austin this Christmastide. At his fictional debut in London in 1843 the old curmudgeon endured a long, long Christmas Eve but came through transformed and redeemed, much to the delight of the reading public early in Victoria's reign. Dickens intended the novella as an uplifting scold and a humanitarian lesson --and a money-maker. He didn't make much from it, particularly once unscrupulous publishers started churning out unauthorized editions. Within a year …
Review: Wait Until Dark by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 09, 2009
Even if you know the famous 1967 Audrey Hepburn/Alan Arkin film version of the acclaimed Broadway play, you are going to find yourself engaged in this meticulously plotted story.
Harry Roat is a really, really mean guy. In this Gaslight Baker Theatre production of Wait Until Dark, David Young plays Roat with alarming, menacing stillness as he snares two minor ex-cons into the hunt for a lost shipment of heroin, setting them up as potential fall guys for a murder that Roat himself has just committed. Yes, this is the one about Suzy, the blind woman that the bad guys are trying to confuse and …
Review: Boom Town by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 27, 2009
All three of these characters are at the ends of their ropes. In the course of the two acts we spend with them, we begin to realize just how far each of them has to fall.
Compression facilitates explosion.This is a relatively simple application of basic physics. External pressure applied to a volatile gas speeds combustion, renders it violent and maximizes heat. That's one of the principles that runs your automobile with its internal combusion engine.Director/designer David Schneider at the Gaslight Baker Theatre in Lockhart applies the principle to Jeff Daniels' sardonically titled "Boom Town."Schneider shrinks the focus within the wide proscenium by masking the wings with black curtains, and sharply …
Review: The Hand That Cradles The Rock by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 07, 2009
Will they or won't they? And what will be the consequences? The answers to those two questions aren't really important, but they justify the ensuing nonsense.
Billy Alexander is beleaguered and bemused throughout this cheery piece of Canadian froth, now playing at the Gaslight Baker Theatre in Lockhart.As the stay-at-home writer Ross Cameron, he's a Mr. Mom surrounded by women: his wife the successful industrial designer, the friendly home care nurse Miss Bricker from the Canadian public health service, and his flighty mother-in-law Beattie, still a dish after all these years. Oh, and his infant daughter, offstage. We never see her …
Review: Almost, Maine by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 09, 2009
Playwright Cariani takes them in some surprising and very comic directions, sometimes applying a deft dab of magical realism.
Lockhart, Texas, is about as far as you can get geographically from this mythical almost-town in the wilds of Maine, but that hardly matters. Director Randy Wachtel and the Gaslight Baker cast of 16 actors open a big box of valentines here. Warm, humorous, comic and sometimes slightly surreal, these nine skits with a little modification could have been played anywhere.The Gaslight Baker motto is "Putting the ART in Lockhart." Anyone who has been following …
Review: Sleuth by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 27, 2008
I was appropriately misdirected, surprised, and satisfied by this production. Congratulations to the actors and to the company for taking it on. I will continue to make that 30-mile trek down to Lockhart.
I continue to be impressed by the craft and love of theatre of the Gaslight Baker Theatre, which is “putting the art in Lockhart.” The broad two-story set installed in the former movie theatre on South Main Street is nothing less than epic, with columns, French doors, a working staircase, a billiard table, meticulous set decoration and furnishings that look authentic and very pricey. The production staff once again mastered that huge expanse of stage and …