Recent Reviews
Review: Godspell by Emily Ann Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 12, 2015
As in most high-energy small-cast musicals, if you don't know individual cast members at the start, you'll feel that you do by the finale.
Medieval guilds and church clergy organized the mystery plays performed before cathedrals or in town pageants. The aim was devotional and pedagogical. Church services were conducted in impenetrable Latin, but festive costumes and drama of Bible stories vividly conveyed stories of the Old and New Testaments to populations that were devout but illiterate. Of the three 'tribal' musicals of late mid-twentieth-century American theatre, the 1970 Godspell by John-Michael Tebelak and Stephen Schwartz is closest to …
Review: Veronica's Room by Oh Dragon Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 07, 2015
At first you share the young woman's incredulity, but as the action proceeds and the stakes mount, you begin to ask yourself whether the playwright has cheated his willing audience.
Have you ever been 'gaslighted'? I didn't know that psychological term before attending Oh Dragon's production of Veronica's Room, but I'm not sure it would have protected me from the confusion and discomfit produced by Ira Levin's 1973 play. Not only were the characters malevolently manipulating one another's perceptions; Lewin the playwright was doing the same to those of us who naïvely agreed to play along with the usual conventions of suspension of disbelief. …
Review: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 04, 2015
Michael Clnkscales has the quiver and rubber-faced grimaces for Pseudolus the tricky slave, but he also has a bounding physical energy. Jeff Philips as Hysterium the major domo is a fine deliberate distrustful foil. The two work together with the familiar ease of a vaudeville duo.
City Theatre's staging of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Foreum has all the cheery exuberance and somewhat retro fun of a toga party at a frat house -- do the on-campus Greeks do that anymore, or has such innocent naughtiness disappeared in today's overload of digital ersatz sophistication? If so, too bad for them; this evening of capers led by R. Michael Clinkscales is merrily nonsensical, a Sondheim/Shevelove/Gelbart celebration of the 'tricky slave' rom-coms …
Review: Talking Pictures by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 01, 2015
If Foote can be compared to Chekhov, as director Nina Bryant suggests, then certainly the Gaslight Baker Theatre Company itself can be seen as containing and preserving all the character types and primal memories of a simpler Texas society.
Horton Foote tells quietly intimate stories set in the vast space of memory that is small-town Texas. That stretch of storytelling is nicely captured by the set and the surroundings of the Gaslight Baker Theatre in Lockhart. Talking Pictures reveals itself on a set of large plaforms standing in vast empty space, with the proscenium of the theatre-turned-movie-house-returned-to-theatre arching behind the notional outline of a house in east Texas. These stories are like a …
Review: The Year of the Rooster by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 29, 2015
Playwright Eric Dufault sinks down into the wild dim mind of a bantam rooster bred for combat and hopped up on steroids, enraged and obsessed with the glare of the sun; Jason Liebrecht incarnates the bird with ferocious sinewy movement and stacatto speech.
You generally have a pretty good idea of what you're going to see at a Capital T production at the Hyde Park Theatre. Strong emotion, blighted lives, poverty or else poverty of spirit amidst mindless materialism, misfits in an America-through-the-looking-glass. The Year of the Rooster fits that template and gives you ample reason to shiver and hug yourself and be thankful for what you've got. But -- as so often with Mark Pickell's band of mischief …
Review: Gusev by Breaking String Theater
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 26, 2015
Graham Schmidt's adaptation and staging of Anton Chekhov's very short story 'Gusev' is a dark and haunting hour of theatre in which concept comes close to overwhelming content.
Graham Schmidt's adaptation and staging of Anton Chekhov's very short story Gusev is a dark and haunting hour of theatre in which concept comes close to overwhelming content. Schmidt and talented collaborators take the ten-page story written by Chekhov in 1890 on his voyage back from Sakhalin Island in Russia's far east and endow it with rich layers of detail, remaining generally faithful to the text and sequence of the original. That overlay distracts …