Recent Reviews
Review: Mad Beat Hip & Gone by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 21, 2013
The brilliant Michael Raiford and videographer/projectionist Colin Lowry must have loved the challenge to fill all that looming space, because they do an amazing job of it.
At first I was disconcerted by the time-line. Playwright-director Steven Dietz places his creations the Nebraska buddies Danny and Rich in 1949 and engineers an encounter with beat adventurers Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. We don't see it; as in ancient Greek theatre that event is reported to us, endowing it with distant mystery and epic sense. But in the opening scenes of Mad Beat Hip & Gone, suddenly Jacob Trussell as Danny is …
Review: The Importance of Being Earnest by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 19, 2013
This play is as toothsome as a plate of scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam. My one request would have been, "Please, may I have some more?" By that, I mean that I'd really like to have seen more.
The delightful wit and frivolity of Oscar Wilde's conceit for this play and the immense seriousness his characters apply to it make The Importance of Being Earnest an enduring favorite. This is the fourth staging of the work in the region since I began writing about theatre nearly five years ago, and it never grows stale. Wilde is not Shakespeare, but his work has a similar vitality and adaptability. His razor-sharp teasing of a distinct sector of …
Review: Slowgirl by Hyde Park Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 24, 2013
Greg Pierce's script has vivid, often wildly comic dialogue and a story of satisfying depth and emotion. The two actors onstage are joined by a full unseen cast in their back stories.
I went to Costa Rica twice this week with Becky to see Sterling. Snapped up the opportunity to slip into a Monday evening preview of Slowgirl by Greg Pierce at the Hyde Park Theatre. Then on Friday I took Karen along to Sterling's open-air hacienda in the dry jungle nine hours away from San José, the capital. It wasn't a long visit -- just under ninety uninterrupted minutes on the veranda and at the labyrinth up …
Review: Lady Windermere's Fan by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 13, 2013
There is so much brainy wit here that at times I regretted the director's choice to keep the dialogue rattling forward like the Schlitterbahn.
Oscar Wilde wrote and proclaimed almost to tedious extent about aestheticism in his early career as writer, lecturer and journalist, and he was so well known for his extravagance and opinions that Gilbert & Sullivan had caricatured him in their 1881 operetta Patience. Wilde wrote a couple of dramatic tragedies in the 1880s that came to nothing, and in 1891 he wrote Salomé, in French. The Lord Chamberlain put a stop to Sara Bernhardt's plan to stage it …
Review: South Pacific by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 06, 2013
Much of the ensemble is made up of folks just like us – who happen to have been blessed with fine singing voices and proximity to the Palace, queen of musical theatre in Central Texas.
The Georgetown Palace Theatre has done it again. The production of South Pacific playing weekends through March, 2013, is energetic, polished and entertaining, a celebration of the classic 1949 musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein. It’s a reminder that at mid-century American musical theatre pioneered new directions in entertainment for a public newly aware of the world beyond Main Street, USA. With their first collaboration Oklahoma! in 1943 Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II drew a symbolic picture of …
Review: Edges, a song cycle by Austin Theatre Project
by David Glen Robinson
Published on March 04, 2013
Out of the musical mass of beer drinking, Facebookin’ and growing up normally there emerged a few of these more resonant bright spots, which naturally shone more brightly by the contrast.
The Austin Theatre Project (ATP) production of Edges by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul gave Austin beautiful music and performances guaranteed to please audiences. Problems with the production and Pasek’s and Paul’s relatively new and somewhat uneven show shouldn't certainly not scare away ticket buyers, certainly not the heart-and-soul musical theatre fanatics who live for it.The program notes were about the music and nothing but the music. They explained the show as a song cycle in which …