Reviews for Texas State University Department of Theatre, Dance and Film Performances
Review: The World According to Snoopy by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2017
Every second of the two hours of performance was thought out, mapped, drilled and rehearsed to easy perfection. These young pros entertain us mightily as they take us to Charles Schultz's sweet world.
It's not surprising that Kaitlin Hopkins, head of musical theatre at Texas State University, was motivated to bring the Peanuts gang back on stage. The director's note in the program of The World According to Snoopy, the reworking of a 1980's musical, reveals that her father was co-producer of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, the first musical with those characters. As a child Hopkins was taken to visit the cartoonist in Santa Rosa, California. Schulz drew the strip for …
Review: Belleville by Amy Herzog, Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 16, 2016
In BELLEVILLE Kailey Hyman has the charisma of an actress capable of evoking sympathy, pity, elation and panic in turn, all couched coherent in a character in search of resolution.
Amy Herzog's Belleville at Texas State offered a clever cross between an Innocents Abroad tale and a psychological thriller of deceit, confusion and crossed cultures. It's no sordid tale of crime; it's a story of loving too much and too blindly. The protagonists are Abby and Zack, married during Zack's med school studies and now relocated to the mixed-ethnic eastern Paris suburb of Belleville. Zack disappears during the day for a residency with a French …
Review: Romeo and Juliet by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 23, 2016
Love and Death share the stage equally in a production that's especially muscular, exciting and full of conflict.
There's this dreamy romantic notion about Romeo and Juliet, one that doesn't get much farther than the Capulet garden, the balcony, and the flattered surprise of sweet Juliet when her longed-for dreamboat comes scrambling out of the darkness. Innocence joined with ardor, two almost-grownups taking their love lives in hand and pledging them to one another. Sigh. But there's also the truth of the Facebook meme about R&J being the story of two …
Review: A Flea in Her Ear by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 09, 2016
Director Michael Costello and the lively young cast do a bang-up job of producing this creaky but timeless classic. Gallic amusement at the foolishness of lust remains unbounded.
Sex farces never grow old because jealousy and foolishness are always with us. Georges Feydeau kept a table at Maxim's in Paris and produced one farce after another, some sixty in all staged over the 40 years before the First World War. A Flea in her Ear (Une Puce à l'Oreille) is by far the best known to English speakers but titles of others suggest that Feydeau knew when he was onto a good thing …
Review: Evita by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 22, 2015
Texas State University's EVITA was gripping and rich, a virtually flawless production of a classic of twentieth-century musical theatre.
Texas State University's production of Evita lit up like fireworks last week at the year-old Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre, a palace to the arts that puts most other performing spaces in Central Texas to shame. And like a fireworks display it surged and dazzled and then in a moment was gone. There's an unfortunate inevitability to programming there by the Theatre Department and the Musical Theatre Program: despite the talent, polish and setting, their theatrical …
Review: Marisol by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 05, 2015
This production of Marisol missed its time slot by a week, for its serious weirdness would have been appropriate for Halloween.
José Rivera's 1993 phantasmagorical play Marisol was awarded an Off-Broadway (Obie) award for playwriting. It must have gotten attention for the deranged excesses of his picture of New York City and a world gone wrong. Rivera imagines a dark, dark world -- morally, ethically and literally, for the sun hasn't been seen for months and there's every indication that the laws of physics have warped beyond predictability. The sun rises in the north and sets in …