Recent Reviews
Review: Dracula by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 28, 2015
For those like my sixth-grade friend Charlie who take Stoker and Shelly as serious as the Kabbala, this one's a must-see.
I met -- and avoided -- Dracula at an early age. Mly sixth-grade friend Charlie was fascinated by the classic narratives of Gothic horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He pressed them upon me, but their quaint and creepy 19th century style was too much. Reading their prose was like pulling a dust-laden velvet curtain back to look for a corpse in a coffin. Later I absorbed the 'horror movie' images of both, comfortingly comical, …
Review: Evita by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 22, 2015
Texas State University's EVITA was gripping and rich, a virtually flawless production of a classic of twentieth-century musical theatre.
Texas State University's production of Evita lit up like fireworks last week at the year-old Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre, a palace to the arts that puts most other performing spaces in Central Texas to shame. And like a fireworks display it surged and dazzled and then in a moment was gone. There's an unfortunate inevitability to programming there by the Theatre Department and the Musical Theatre Program: despite the talent, polish and setting, their theatrical …
Review: Other Desert Cities by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 21, 2015
Other Desert Cities is not a holiday play; but it does allow us to unwrap a mystery that turns out to be a gift to all concerned.
Sharp, contemporary and merciless, Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities has a lot to say. Just like protagonist Brooke Wyeth the young novelist who flamed out after an early success and suffered six years of writer's block and desperate depression. Brooke is visiting her parents in Palm Springs, that odd lush oasis in the California desert along I-10 east of Los Angeles. It's Christmastime, 2004, in the never-winter to which her parents have withdrawn in their …
21st Century Theatre: Texting and Gesturing the Future in Austin productions of DEUS EX MACHINA and THE BOWIE PROJECT
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 20, 2015
Can we truly perceive a new thing? Two Austin productions in 2015 are candidates for future-forward potential.
January A digitally obsessive audience, its thumbs working furiously, sits around a thrust stage in the Rollins Studio Theatre at the Long Center in Austin. Produced with The Fusebox Festival and Shrewd Productions, the play is Whirligig Productions’ Deus Ex Machina and the year is 2015. The audience members hurriedly text yes/no and either/or responses to prompts on a screen above suppliants at the stage Oracle of Delphi. The texts go to the number …
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 …
Nahum Tate, Knock-offs, Lear and 'Tatefication'
by Stephen Meigs
Published on November 18, 2015
Nahum Tate fits Willy Loman’s definition of a loser: “He was liked… but not well liked.”
Toward a Traditional Trampling of the Reputation of Mr. Nahun Tate The History Of King Lear, Nahum Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic, was popular for 150 years. But that’s not his only claim to fame. Tate also wrote lyrics for a Christmas carol still sung today, “While Shepherds watched their flocks at night, ” here performed by the King’s College Choir in 2011. No Blanche Dubois, Mr. Tate had no use …