Reviews for Zach Theatre Performances
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 girls in …
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 …
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 …
Review: The Santaland Diaries by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 18, 2012
Sedaris' text is smug and sarcastic, an appropriate antidote to all the sugar swirlilng around at this time of year, but Martin Burke himself is the reason to go see the supposed sayanora performances.
Zach Theatre Artistic Director Dave Steakley says that this is the last time -- for a while -- they'll stage David Sedaris' The Santaland Diaries. This is the 15th (!) season they've done it, so perhaps it's time, but if like me you had abstained from attending this holiday ritual, it's time to swing on board before the caboose gets out of reach. The program states that Martin Burke has been doing his role as …
Review: Ragtime by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 30, 2012
Ragtime is a big production for a big new theatre, one that says, loud and proud, that 'Austin's theatre' offers a level of artistic and technical excellence as good as any in the country.
The Zach's Ragtime is a huge -- I mean HUGE -- and lavish production, inaugurating its state-of-the-art 425-seat Topfer theatre. The flair, finish and finesse of this production are simply breath-taking. Ragtime is a fable of a faraway America, one that existed at the very opening of the twentieth century. In his 1975 novel E.L. Doctorow imagined a tangled story involving a prosperous bourgeois family in New Rochelle, an unmarried African-American couple and their child, …