Reviews for Texas State University Department of Theatre, Dance and Film Performances
Review: BIG LOVE by Charles Mee, Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 10, 2023
BIG LOVE, Charles Mee's riff on the earliest extant Greek drama, under Allison Price's direction was vibrant with the hormones, clashing views, and intensity of our own era's war between men and women—a notable achievement.
What goes around, comes around. Not only in the sense of retribution, but also as recycling and renewal. I reviewed a production of Charles Mee's Big Love when CTXLT was but a blog. Turns out that Caleb Straus's 2009 staging was at Texas State University. And now, thirteen and a half years later, director Allison Price has renewed the work at the same university—in the same locale, but in a theatre turned inside-out …
Review: Little Women, the Broadway musical by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 22, 2019
LITTLE WOMEN showcases impressive vocal talents, giving them a full Broadway-style musical workout. The score and lyrics are full of flinging ambition, self query, and sentiment. And we know the sisters will all turn out just fine.
Texas State University's Little Women is a lovely evening of performance, and by now this Broadway rendering of Louisa May Alcott's novel about the four March sisters in Concord, New Hampshire, during Civil War years, a favorite of young girls, may well be more known and popular than the original. A quick check of the captain's logs at CTXLT revealed a total of nine productions of the 2005 work over the last five years -- …
Review: The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 29, 2019
James Lapine's rewrite of the film reaches toward the seriousness of grand opera. The craft and art of the Texas State program elevate it impressively.
You're unlikely to see a musical production of this scope and flourish on Broadway these days. In fact, the stage version of Disney's 1996 animated film was produced and premiered in Berlin in 1999, where it had a successful three-year run. It didn't get to America until 2014, but Broadway wasn't in the cards. The Disney folks were convinced that the popularity of the film wouldn't be great enough to haul enough tourists into …
Review: Cabaret by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 16, 2018
CABARET, that warhorse of American musical theatre, was up and rearing at Texas State, not about to give up -- a memorable and very twenty-first-century evening.
Christopher Isherwood's stories of 1930's Berlin, that sink of jolly depravity, have transmuted since their 1945 publication. First reworked as John Van Druten's play I Am A Camera, then chosen by Kander and Ebb for the 1966 musical, the strange weird world became the 1972 film in which Michael York seemed clueless and Liza Minelli was a heedless chanteuse indifferent both to conventional morals and to the storm gathering over Germany. Here we are, fifty-two years …
Review: Ragtime by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 21, 2018
If you missed this RAGTIME, take heart. As astonishingly impressive as was this production of Ragtime and as heart-breaking was the shortness of its formal run, Texas State under the leadership of Ms Hopkins is bound to go from strength to strength.
"They're running only six performances?" Karen exclaimed afterwards. "That's a crime!" All right, that reaction was a bit exaggerated, but it captures what the Texas State musical theatre people have done: by building the program over the past decade, the school has assembled an artistic critical mass that allows it to fill and paint the stage with such an overabundance of talent that their productions, including this one of the epic musical Ragtime, would …
Review: A Chorus Line by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 28, 2017
Let's applaud long and hard to signal our appreciation for these beautiful aspiring performers. We wouldn't wish such agonies upon any of them. Unless, of course, they insist. . . .
One reason A Chorus Line endures is that it captures for us the intense ephemeral nature of theatre and dance -- by portraying the anxiety of performers who've trained to the highest level but are subject to the arbitrary whims and preferences of a director or backer of a show. It's a peek behind the curtains of Broadway and Baghdad-on-the-Hudson. It's a glimpse of the ever true: for every dancer or actor successfully strutting …