Recent Reviews
Review: Chicago
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 21, 2014
An enthusiastic voice behind us as we exited Bass Concert Hall at the University of Texas last night: "That was nothing like the movie!" Live performance, even in the cavernous space of the Bass, can seize your attention and send your heart racing in ways that no flat screen image ever can. And that's what happens in the 15th (annual?) tour of Chicago, playing in Austin through this coming Sunday. The story is familiar and, …
Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 20, 2014
Opened just a year ago, the Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre at Texas State is a first-class facility, ample both inside and in its exterior spaces, spacious but at the same time snug. But you may find yourself disconcerted, even disoriented as you wait for the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream, for the stage is bare. You can see all the way to the cinderblock stark walls in the depths of the performing space. At …
Review: Nursery Crimes by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 17, 2014
David Boss with his resonant baritone and weary dead-pan styling makes a fine Philip Marlowe, or, in acknowledgment of the film noir inspiration for playwright Greg Klein and the company, a good Bogey. Klein's play is an homage to that very distinctive style, so much so that the first half of the Kickstarter promo video was a 1940s-style dramatization with first-person narration, video-recorded in stark black and white by director Will Hollis Snider. You could …
Review: Wittenberg by Playhouse San Antonio
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 14, 2014
Davalos puts Faustus on the philosophy faculty, devoted to independent inquiry, presents Martin Luther as a somber senior lecturer in theology, and portrays the undergraduate Hamlet as indecisive, moody, and something of a slacker. And so the fun begins.
There's some wickedly clever entertainment taking place down in the cellar of Playhouse San Antonio, where playwright-actor David Davalos is doing saucy stand-up comedy set in early 16th century Germany. In the second scene of Hamlet, Claudius the new king informs the prince, "For your intent in going back to school in Wittenberg, It is most retrograde to our desire." That university in Saxony, nearly a century old when Shakespeare was writing, was reputed in …
Review: Wail by Gale Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 12, 2014
Like all black box theatres, the playing space at the Vortex is vibrant with possibilities. It resembles Hamlet’s walnut:"I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space." And it’s subject to the same proviso: "Were it not that I had bad dreams!" In their performance of Wail Gale Theatre Company, devotees of devised theatre, explore bad dreams with a spooky, kinetic ferocity. Mary Catherine’s perched onstage as the audience …
Review: Ay, No! by Teatro Vivo
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 09, 2014
Coronado Castillo's piece would have been more satisfying if it had offered some hope of enduring emotional attachment between the two women. Instead, she pumps us up with the comedy of mockery, exaggeration and irony.
Liz Coronado Castillo's comedy telegraphs its quirky contradictions right on the poster: One chica. Two tías. And three fairy-drag-queens. The mind boggles: let's fling a trio of campy drag performers into a patio occupied by a thoroughly traditional Latino matriarchy and enjoy the fireworks and confusion. On opening night most of the audience was enthusiastic and willing to linger afterwards to praise the humor and the message of tolerance. Aye, No! balances those two worlds …