Reviews for Georgetown Palace Theatre Performances
Review: Same Time, Next Year by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 29, 2013
The world of the play is pretty much irrelevant to the contemporary world of instant messaging, hooking up, friends with benefits, living together without sanction of marriage and easy divorces. And to anyone born since the play was first staged in 1975.
Yes, I would be delighted to enjoy a guilt-free assignation once a year with the energetic, sweet and affectionate Virginia Keeley. Fellow actor Bill Barry has had that privilege this month at the Georgetown Palace, at least in our imaginations. Since the six scenes in Bernard Slade's play span the twenty-four years between 1951 and 1975, Barry's averaging just about one imaginary assignation a day. (And by his exuberant count in the final scene, …
Review: South Pacific by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 06, 2013
Much of the ensemble is made up of folks just like us – who happen to have been blessed with fine singing voices and proximity to the Palace, queen of musical theatre in Central Texas.
The Georgetown Palace Theatre has done it again. The production of South Pacific playing weekends through March, 2013, is energetic, polished and entertaining, a celebration of the classic 1949 musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein. It’s a reminder that at mid-century American musical theatre pioneered new directions in entertainment for a public newly aware of the world beyond Main Street, USA. With their first collaboration Oklahoma! in 1943 Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II drew a symbolic picture of …
Review: Singin' in the Rain by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 07, 2012
Watson's casting at the Palace has produced an exhilarating variation. Here the athlete is Kevin Oliver in the role of Cosmo. Jim Lindsay as Don Lockwood is smaller of frame and light on his feet; with such a natural grace he's a grown-up edition of one of those balletic Sharks from West Side Story
Gotta sing! Gotta dance! Those could be the rallying cries for the Georgetown Palace Theatre. Under the years of Mary Ellen Butler's artistic direction, this community institution in the elegantly refurbished movie house off the courthouse square has seen very little down time, given its eight-show season and its classes for adults and for young people. The staff and the unpaid actors and tech folk send familiar musicals and plays down the chutes one …
Review: I Hate Hamlet by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 17, 2012
I Hate Hamlet moves quickly, has a touch of wisdom, only a whiff of pathos, a good deal of tolerance for the acting profession, and plenty of laughs along the way.
You don't have to hate Shakespeare's Hamlet in order to enjoy this lighthearted romp, but it does help to have an appreciation for ghosts. We're not talking about the grim visaged former king of Shakespeare's imagined Denmark, but about the much friendlier shade of the great tragedian John Barrymore. Once he appears after the obligatory set-up scenes of the television actor and his girlfriend moving into an ancient and remarkable old apartment in New York City, Kyle …
Review: A Christmas Carol, the musical by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 30, 2011
A Christmas Carol demonstrated once again the extraordinary strengths of the Palace as a center for community arts, and this version of the redemption of irascible Ebeneezer preserved the message of the much beloved story.
Spirit, I have not been the man I ought to have been for this holiday season; caught up with the visit of family -- my brother from Tennessee for two weeks, then for Christmastide and for two birthday celebrations my venerable in-laws, my wife's brother and our two children with their respective significant others -- I did not reserve the time and space for thought and writing. To my discomfort, I deliver this review …
Review: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 16, 2011
This show won't give you much to ponder, but it will keep throwing things at you until you laugh and smile.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is set in a mythic French Riviera, a delirious paradise that seems to be populated only by rich Americans, a couple of rival American con artists, and one charmingly corrupt French police chief. It's a concept that would make the French laugh out loud. Not that they don't have their own share of nutty cinematic visions, including le vieux Far West, but because this is Cannes as the returned GIs imagined it. Or Monte Carlo …