Reviews for Zach Theatre Performances
Review: Harvey by Zach Theatre
by Christine El-Tawil
Published on May 20, 2013
Martin Burke’s subtle gestures and affably earnest conversations with Harvey have you almost seeing the giant white rabbit yourself! Burke portrays Elwood’s genuinely friendly nature without out a single false note.
Harvey by Mary Chase at the Zach Theatre, directed by Dave Steakley, is a laughter-inducing good time. It centers around Elwood P. Dowd , a charming, generous and altogether very pleasant man who happens to have an invisible six-foot rabbit named Harvey as his best friend. Martin Burke’s comic performance is flawless, once again. Burke’s subtle gestures and affably earnest conversations with Harvey have you almost seeing the giant white rabbit yourself! Burke portrays Elwood’s genuinely …
Review: Mad Beat Hip & Gone by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 21, 2013
The brilliant Michael Raiford and videographer/projectionist Colin Lowry must have loved the challenge to fill all that looming space, because they do an amazing job of it.
At first I was disconcerted by the time-line. Playwright-director Steven Dietz places his creations the Nebraska buddies Danny and Rich in 1949 and engineers an encounter with beat adventurers Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. We don't see it; as in ancient Greek theatre that event is reported to us, endowing it with distant mystery and epic sense. But in the opening scenes of Mad Beat Hip & Gone, suddenly Jacob Trussell as Danny is …
Review: A Ride with Bob by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 21, 2013
This jovial and tuneful evening is a blend of a good news mega-church service, a dance hall evening, serious biography and comedy routines of the sort that Homer and Jethro used to do for RCA and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
This was my first time to see this comical-historical-pastoral concert piece by Ann Rapp and Texas music star big Ray Benson. You might well have seen early stagings in 2005 or later tour dates; the public message is that this four-night-and-two-matinee celebration is happening this week, February 20 - 24, as a farewell to Austin. We may well hope that's a marketing ploy and not a definitive retirement decision, because the boys and …
Review: 33 Variations by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 08, 2013
As world-class pianist Anton Nel performs those intricate, vigorous variations, the rest of the show plays out before him like music hall scenes, tear jerkers and clown numbers.
In 1819 Viennese music publisher Anton Diabelli invited many of the leading musicians of the Habsburg empire to compose a variation upon a simple waltz of his own devising. Profits from the project were to be contributed to support orphans and widows of soldiers killed in the Napoleonic wars. Ludwig von Beethoven initially declined to contribute, then changed his mind. He eventually penned 33 variations, over several years, which Diabelli published as a separate volume …
Review: Tru by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 22, 2013
Jaston Williams can't shrink to Capote's diminutive dimensions, but he certainly expands to fill the man's astonishing character.
Jaston Williams and director Larry Randolph take us to another place and time with Tru, now on an extended run at the Zach's intimate theatre-in-the-round Whisenhunt stage. Michael Raiford's clever low-level set is Truman Capote's UN Plaza apartment in New York City in 1975. It's a long long way from Greater Tuna, where Williams and Joe Sears romped, mugged and portrayed a whole looney town -- or, for that matter from Thornton Wilder's Our Town in which Williams …
Review: White Christmas by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 20, 2012
So here's your choice: the Zach Theatre production as Christmas comfort food, done with energy and not a trace of irony (yes, there are snowflakes swirling down for the finale) or the 1954 movie. By the way, the film was done in Technicolor. And it has Bing Crosby and Donald O'Connor.
The Zach Theatre throws everything it's got at White Christmas, and it shows. Nick Demos' inventive choreography is on display; Allen Robertson conducts a vigorous nine-piece orchestra tucked out of sight beneath the stage; invited stars Matthew Redden and Matt Gibson make a plausible buddy team, even though they don't much resemble Bing and Donald. Our Meredith McCall is there as the older, wiser and more angular of the hoofin' Haynes Sisters nightclub act, and the fifteen-person …