Reviews for Trinity Street Players Performances
Review: Side Show by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 18, 2018
The real appeal of the piece is the Side Show cast, which is a rich candy box of Austin musical theatre performers exulting in the pieces by Bill Russell and composer Henry Krieger.
Theatre art is always a time machine of sorts, and the Trinity Street Players give us a lens into at least four eras: the early 20th century of tawdry sideshows, higher toned vaudeville, and pre-Code motion pictures; the mid-1990's when Bill Russell's musical about the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton surprised and intrigued New York theatre; 2014 when the show was reworked and revived successfully; and our own world of 2018, where the diversity …
Review: Dani Girl by Trinity Street Players
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 20, 2017
The cast of DANI GIRL includes some of Austin’s best theatrical singers and a successful set in Trinity Street Players' intimate inviting space. The only real ding on Dani Girl is the song and scene about the kids forming a suicide pact.
Dani Girl is a musical story about children with cancer. The action takes place in a ward of a children’s hospital. It may seem macabre to produce a show with dying kids loaded full with laughs and hilarity, but such oddball sensibilities never stopped Steven Sondheim or John Waters. Composer Michael Kooman and lyricist/writer Christopher Dimond leap headlong into the field filled with risk and for the most part succeed in their musical efforts.Thanks to the producers, …
Review: Lone Riders by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 19, 2016
The portrait session is a tidily symbolic moment, a reminder that art, including this polished staging, captures ever so fleetingly the richness and complexity of life.
Lone Riders speaks of vast distances, and every aspect of the Trinity Street Players' production keys on that theme. This is the Nebraska Territory in 1865. From the first moments as the audience listens to Walker Lyle's musing cowboy music, the allied concepts of set designer David Weaver and lighting designer Courtney Deriger make that vastness real. A battered wooden shack for a stage depot, a barren courtyard, a bench, a tree, tools and the …
Review: Our Town by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 20, 2015
Trinity Street Players take us far away for the evening and at the same time they bring us back home.
I'm still a bit out of kilter and pensive. Just days after Stage Manager Scot Friedman gave the audience his confiding opening-night tour of Our Town, Grover's Corners, NH, we spent a weekend in St. Joseph, Michigan. An extended family clustered around three nonogenarian brothers as they went back to the scenes of their 1930s boyhood. Their town's not a lot larger than Grover's Corners and it's equally well furnished with memories. Our …
Review: Marvin's Room by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 16, 2014
The title of Scott McPherson's Marvin's Room appeared to me at first recollection to be puzzling or simply misleading. After all, we never do see Marvin, the father felled twenty years earlier by a stroke. That character lives in the dim light of an adjacent bedroom and we glimpse scarcely any of the space he inhabits. We're drawn instead into a different space, the room that is defined by family connections. It's a space that one may …
Review: Coriolanus by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 20, 2012
Primus inter pares is Charles P. Stites as Meninius Agrippa, the confident, humorous old patrician. Stites makes every syllable and movement count. His presence is so vivid that at times he upstages the whole crowd of players without appearing to move a muscle.
In his March 2010 profile of Austin theatre for World Theatre Day, Austin Chronicle arts editor and theatre artist Robert Faires noted that certain works, including Shakespeare's 'Scottish play' and A Midsummer Night's Dream, "circle round again and again like pop songs in heavy rotation. In fact, Austin theatre companies have a curious tendency to remount all kinds of plays that were staged in the area within the past 10 or so years, as if it …