Reviews for Zach Theatre Performances
Review: Our Town by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 23, 2010
'Our Town' is both their town -- Thornton Wilder's Grovers Corners, New Hampshire, 1904 - 1913 -- and our town, Austin in 2010.
Our Town is both their town -- Thornton Wilder's Grovers Corners, New Hampshire, 1904 - 1913 -- and our town, Austin in 2010. Dave Steakley and the large, talented cast at the Zach have a good time with the clever palimpsest of modern Austin that they use to reinvigorate a text that many of us first read in high school. It works, too, at least most of the time. This styling reminds us gently, insistently …
Review: The Flaming Idiots by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 05, 2010
It's all juggling and comedy, and it's all spectacle. Don't expect any narrative other than the quirky bounce of their funnymen personalities.
They juggled and joked together for 20 years, and now they're back, while they can still do it. In his program note, Rob Williams -- the beaming little guy in the yellow shirt -- says that the Zach gave them the step up from renaissance fairs and comedy clubs to the world of regional theatres, network television and off-Broadway. They disbanded in 2004 but last year resurrected the act, playing in Edmonton, Canada, then moving …
Review: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2009
The slightly risqué humor might merit a PG-13 if this were a movie, but frankly, it's just the sort of grinning adolescent naughtiness appropriate to the middle-schoolers the cast is portraying here.
This show is a charmer. It has the zing of a small scale musical, the familiarity of all those school auditoriums you endured while growing up, the uncertainties of a tournament, the highs of competition, the quips and laughs of improv comedy, and -- unexpectedly -- a second act that resonates with drama and tenderness.Michael Raiford's set is bright, functional and simple, using the Kleberg Stage's thrust stage as a "cafetorium" in an anonymous middle …
Review: Let Me Down Easy by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 21, 2009
Her performance is a portrait album, recreating for us conversations or interviews with individuals as widely different as super model Lauren Hutton and a 16-year-old girl in small town Texas struck with cancer.
We go to the theatre to be delighted or to be moved.On rare occasions we are both delighted and moved. And on even rarer occasions, an artist of exceptional intelligence and ability delights, moves and educates us. This evening with Anna Deavere Smith, intimate and often amusing, reaches deep into the common humanity of Americans.Her performance is a portrait album, recreating for us conversations or interviews with individuals as widely different as super model Lauren …
Review: The Grapes of Wrath by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 16, 2009
The story is gripping. In the theatre it is unburdened by the grim omniscience of Steinbeck's overlay and so allows us to identify with the Joad family and to hope for them even as they pass under the millstone of history.
A brooding orange light dominates the empty central space at the Zach Theatre's Kleberg Stage. A haze roils fitfully against a panorama of emptiness. A man in overalls, wearing a slouch cap and heavy work boots, holds a saw between his knees. He gently applies a bow to it, bends the saw, and an eerie, keening melody begins The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck's story follows the Joad family from the 1930s Oklahoma Dustbowl, driven …
Review: Shooting Star by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 19, 2009
'Shooting Star' trades on a fascination similar to that mined by www.classmates.com. What ever happened to. . . .? Do you really, really want to know? Do you want that person to know what has happened to you and how you have changed?
Steven Dietz's latest world premiere is a wistful two-character piece aimed directly at the soft heart of the baby boomer generation. These two were lovers in their early twenties in Madison, Wisconsin, sometime in the 1970s but they've long been out of touch, getting on with their lives. By chance they find themselves -- and one another -- in a snowed-in airport somewhere in the Midwest (think, maybe, Midway in Chicago). It's a situation ripe …