Reviews for Zach Theatre Performances
Review: Spring Awakening by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 27, 2011
The story's message --warning of the dangers of moral tyranny -- is sobering and predictable but ever-applicable, the dizzying, tongue-in-cheek music sending up the misguided adults throughout will leave audiences wondering whether the events were tragic or comic.
Spring Awakening won eight of the 2007 Tony awards, including that for best musical, and the powerful production opened by the Zach Theatre last Saturday shows you why. This very contemporary musical adaptation of Franz Wedekind's Spring Awakening has played across Europe, and the U.S. national touring company fielded by Broadway Across America visited Bass Hall for a week in October, 2009. Awakening has now settled in to the Kleberg Stage until November 13 playing an extended Tuesday to Sunday …
Review: The Book of Grace by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 24, 2011
I glimpsed an on-line comment that The Book of Grace "delivers a punch in the gut." Hmm. Maybe. What I recall is the subdued ironic comment heard behind me as I exited the theatre: "Well, that was certainly an uplifting evening, wasn't it?"
The marketing strategy of putting the playwright on the poster bothers me. It's a feeling made all the sharper by the Zach Theatre's importing of MacArthur 'Genius Grantee' Suzan-Lori Parks twice over the past six months for sessions entitled "Watch Me Work." The public was invited to watch Parks write -- at a desk? on a computer? on a yellow legal pad? -- for most of an hour, following which she had an exchange with …
Review: August: Osage County by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 12, 2011
Tennessee Williams was a dour idealist. Letts, in contrast, is a nihilist whose message is that our American culture is rotting at its heart. He's a man of black humors entertaining us in a wasteland.
Director Dave Steakley proves that with a first-rate cast and a gifted scenic designer he can turn Tracey Letts' savage misanthropy into a mesmerizing long evening in the theatre. That's no modest achievement. The last -- and first -- Letts work I saw was Capital T Theatre's Killer Joe, which I found violent and obscene. Not in the sexual sense, but because Letts took such evident pleasure in degrading his working-class characters. Perhaps Letts is easier …
Review: Fiction by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 24, 2011
The plot turns are artful but I found myself wondering why I should care at all. The Watermans are irretrievably shallow.
The University of Texas at Austin with its ambitious program for drama and playwriting is fortunate to have hired the prolific Steven Dietz away from Seattle. On the evidence of the four Dietz plays staged here over the last couple of years, he possesses a sure sense of craft as well as an understanding of the hazy dreams of middle class America. The Zach Theatre chose to feature Dietz himself in its promotional …
Review: Rent by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 24, 2010
The show roars -- literally. The band dimly visible behind the chain link fence at center stage has got its amps turned all the way up under the direction of Allen Robertson. Microphones on the singers are not sufficient to protect them or us.
Rent is the sort of production the Zach theatre uses to pay the rent: the staging of a familiar rock and roll work with appeal for the young, for the young professionals, for the creatives and for the club goers. Seen as daring at its 1996 debut, Rent has become sufficiently mainstream that it can be staged in community theatres, summer theatres, and, this past February, even by the kidsActing studio here in Austin. Director Dave Steakley gets …
Review: Metamorphoses by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 06, 2010
Call this the Cirque de Soleil approach to Greek myth. . . .(In case you didn't catch it, the Apple computer represented Pandora's box, the one that unleashed evils on the world.)
Call this the Cirque de Soleil approach to Greek myth. From its 1996 origin at Northwestern University Mary Zimmerman's piece used a pool of water as its central metaphor -- suggesting the chaos at creation and both the life-giving and life-threatening qualities of water and the sea. At Northwestern the piece was staged next to and in an Olympic standard pool. The water setting was retained at the Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago and at the Circle …