Recent Reviews
Review: Stalking John Barrowman by Last Act Theater Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 05, 2015
This show wins with fresh wit and seemingly new melodies. The songs also render that giggly middle-school humor of presenting a few sly obscenities in song.
Stalking John Barrowman is a delightful, uproarious, sensational work of musical theatre. It has all of those qualities in abundance, plus it is loaded with that dry, obscene British wit, the kind Americans love. Think Monty Python’s Flying Circus with pussy, twat, and labia jokes. Don’t forget the twins Poo and Pee. No, stop what you’re thinking; it is all presented quite cleanly, with surprise after surprise, none of which will be revealed here. The plot …
Review: Much Ado About Nothing by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 05, 2015
In this sprightly production the transformation of the sullen Don John into Dona Giovanna (Leanne Holmquist) is deft, apt, clear and powerful.
"Twenty-one productions in thirteen years!" director Monette Mueller informed opening-night spectators gathered before the torch-lit boards of the Curtain Theatre. The Baron's Men first performed in October, 2002 on a makeshift stage erected that very day. Their patron Richard Garriott later had a tidy Elizabethan-style stage erected for them on the north bank of the Colorado River, just west of the 360 bridge, and they've explored Shakespeare and other authors of early modern drama in …
Review: Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2015
Washburn's work is a think piece with worthy aims, but it fails to connect with the audience precisely because of its thesis.
American popular imaginings of recent years have been enamoured of dystopian tales of post-industrial collapse. It's not a new trope: Orson Welles' 1939 War of the Worlds hinted at it and Neville Shute's 1959 On the Beach haunted a Western world newly conscious of the H-Bomb. Hollywood has been tearing civilization apart with CGI-FX glee for decades; the first Mad Max movie was in 1979. Cormac McCarthy's 2006 The Road is a stark father-and-son survival epic. My favorite …
Review: The Real Thing by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 27, 2015
Wit is not obliged to be funny. THE REAL THING isn't a comedy, but it flashes with insights of a grown-up exploration of the contracts of human hearts.
Wit is not obliged to be funny. The Real Thing isn't a comedy, but it flashes with insights and features exchanges as swift, surprising and unexpected as those of a fencing match. Austin Playhouse provides an assured and impressive production of this grown-up exploration of the hearts' contract that is the essence of any lengthy intimate relationship. And most particularly, its exploration of the issues of emotional fidelity and toleration of sentimental and sexual …
Review: Freud's Last Session by Jarrott Productions
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 26, 2015
The play collects grand thoughts from people in an important time and place and fossilizes them beautifully in the amber of this Jarrott Productions show.
Freud’s Last Session, a one-act play by Mark St. Germain, has opened at Trinity Street Theatre in downtown Austin. This production of Jarrott Productions stars producer David Jarrott as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Tyler Jones as writer-philosopher C.S. Lewis.They enact a fictional meeting between the two intellectuals at Freud’s office in London on September 3, 1939, the day Britain and its allies declared war on Germany following Hitler’s invasion of Poland.Freud had relocated to London earlier …
Review: Never Such Rain by Tegan McLeod
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 18, 2015
The moves of the final moments, when Jesse twists sinuously around Brandon and the clasp of their pistol, are deft, neat choreography summing up these two damned souls' relationship to the pitiless outer world.
Lily Wolff places Tegan McLeod's Never Such Rain on the stage of UT's Lab Theatre with the audience sitting on the twenty folding chairs along three sides of that space. This is theatre up close and in your face, the way I like it most. I was lucky to snag a chair at the Wednesday opening of this short run, for most had names of IndieGoGo supporters taped on them. I'd thought I could buy a …