Review: HAMLET by Trinity University, San Antonio

by Michael Meigs
Published on November 14, 2024

The Trinity University cast of 39 had no doubts at all about the language, the length, or the deep themes of Shakespeare's most famous work. Anna Kate Vaughan's Hamlet is contemporary, swift, articulate, and intentional.

Trinity University's Dr. Stacey Connelly has taken on an audacious challenge: staging Shakespeare's Hamlet for the first time in the theatre program's 56-year history. This is Shakespeare's longest play, with texts published postumously in quarto and folio editions that hardly matched at all. Combining these, editors constructed the revered "complete text." Connelly appears to have staged that version, which runs three and a half hours, including about twenty minutes of break for intermission and scene …

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Review: The Threepenny Opera by Trinity University

by Michael Meigs
Published on November 19, 2015

Amy Rossini as the squalling, swiling, worldly-wise Mrs. Peachum doesn't court the audience so much as bowl them over with her pep, focus and singing.

It must be a thrill to perform in that jangly, dissonant and exuberant Brecht-Weil world of The Threepenny Opera, especially for college-age artists. It portrays a society turned upside down, one in which we're rooting for a an elegantly carefree, immoral and unrepentant thief and murderer. The wealthy and the bourgeois exclude and exploit the denizens of the Victorian underworld, and Macheath (the stylish Alejandro Cardona) hasn't the slightest remorse about beguiling and betraying the …

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