Recent Reviews
Review: Richard II by Poor Shadows of Elysium
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 01, 2013
Richard II is a text that's rarely performed, so true believers do the rest of us a service by blowing off the dust and showing it to us.
The Poor Shadows of Elysium is newly established but its principals and associates are well known to the curious collection of Shakespeare enthusiasts in Austin. After appearing in recent years as Oberon, Prospero, Mercutio, and Marcus of Titus Andronicus, Kevin Gates surrendered to the lure of Renaissance drama and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Texas State. His partner and executive producer Bridget Farias has been running the EmilyAnn Theatre in Wimberley with summer "Shakespeare …
Review: The Ivy House by Chris Fontanes, Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 28, 2013
Memoryspeak by these characters informs us of a pregnancy, an accident that was really a suicide, a fierce breakup and abandonment and a despairing effort to reach beyond the grave.
The very venue is a dream catcher. This tidy wood-frame two-story house is situated on Garden Street -- hence its bed & breakfast title The Eponymous Garden -- and it's saturated with atmosphere. Owner Sterling Price-McKinney has written scripts for performance here in connection with the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, and this is the location for the SVT's annual fundraiser. This isn't the Austin of of the politicians and high rollers who used the Driskill Hotel just …
Review: A Steady Rain by A Chick and A Dude Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 28, 2013
Huff's language is so vivid and Ken Bradley's delivery of it is so intense, convincing in rhythm and dialect and so disturbing that one stumbles out of the theatre afterward with images seared into one's imagination.
Keith Huff imagines a dark, dark world for us, and Shanon Weaver's set design mirrors that. This is Chicago in grim weather. The bare stage has only a couple of banged up folding chairs and a table, and the stage walls are painted in vertical strips of greenish blue and black. It could be an interrogation room but really it's a barren nowhere, a place of the mind that one could just as easily imagine …
Review: The Screwtape Letters by touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 26, 2013
McLean creates a Screwtape who's certainly larger than life. The odd but imaginative set depicts a credibly comfortable afterlife for the evildoer, and McLean's gestures, blocking and vocal treatment convey his great relish for the text.
Max McLean certainly looked the part of Screwtape, the senior demon imagined by C.S. Lewis for his 1942 epistolary Christian novela The Screwtape Letters Portly and with an untidy mane of graying hair, comfortably elegant in a red quilted dressing gown, he was the picture of a sybaritic Victorian gentleman at home in his study with attendant hissing demon. Attendant demon? Well, yes; one imagines that as a relatively senior member of the administration of Our …
Review: The Interior Landscape of the Emotional Mind by Chaddick Dance Theater
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 25, 2013
The Chaddick company performed the dances of this integrated show in the hallways, balconies, rehearsal studios and alcoves of Ballet Austin, shifting the setting metaphorically into a many-chambered mind to show us facets of that often perplexing house within us all.
It was a cold night in Austin, made worse by the biting wind that swirled around its towers and roared down its streets. Inside Ballet Austin studios, Cheryl Chaddick and company lay in wait for their audiences with a well-prepared dance show that eventually took us to the forefront of Austin and regional contemporary dance. The Interior Landscape of the Emotional Mind was presented as a site-specific dance, or site dance. How fitting that an …
Review: A Ride with Bob by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 21, 2013
This jovial and tuneful evening is a blend of a good news mega-church service, a dance hall evening, serious biography and comedy routines of the sort that Homer and Jethro used to do for RCA and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
This was my first time to see this comical-historical-pastoral concert piece by Ann Rapp and Texas music star big Ray Benson. You might well have seen early stagings in 2005 or later tour dates; the public message is that this four-night-and-two-matinee celebration is happening this week, February 20 - 24, as a farewell to Austin. We may well hope that's a marketing ploy and not a definitive retirement decision, because the boys and …