Recent Reviews
Review: Coriolanus by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 20, 2012
Primus inter pares is Charles P. Stites as Meninius Agrippa, the confident, humorous old patrician. Stites makes every syllable and movement count. His presence is so vivid that at times he upstages the whole crowd of players without appearing to move a muscle.
In his March 2010 profile of Austin theatre for World Theatre Day, Austin Chronicle arts editor and theatre artist Robert Faires noted that certain works, including Shakespeare's 'Scottish play' and A Midsummer Night's Dream, "circle round again and again like pop songs in heavy rotation. In fact, Austin theatre companies have a curious tendency to remount all kinds of plays that were staged in the area within the past 10 or so years, as if it …
Review: Can Can: A 1940's Floor Show by Exchange Artists
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 15, 2012
Exchange Artists remains true to its huge creative energies, and everything it produces offers beautiful gifts to its audiences.
I picked my way through the new development and blocked streets of downtown Austin to find this new bar I’d never heard of, the Palm Door. After hiking blocks, I saw it—it was the building formerly occupied by City Grille, once the best seafood restaurant in Austin. The address is 401 Sabine Street, immediately across the street east of the convention center. I want everyone to find it more easily than I did because the …
Review: Mariachi Girl
by Jessica Marie Padilla
Published on November 10, 2012
Mariachi Girl is a well rounded Theatre for Youth musical enjoyed by all ages, one that asks important questions of its audiences. The musical asked me to remember.
I remember it as if I had suddenly woken from a dream. I was crouching on the living floor, ear pressed to the window like Beethoven, listening to the sound of a tuning guitar, chords on a keyboard, and the distinct hum of the accordion and amplifier. They were bringing my mother a serenade for Día de Las Madres, Mother’s Day. It was my father, grandfather, and whatever friend they could find with a cable and …
Review: The Pain and the Itch by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 05, 2012
Norris writes with a scalpel whetted to such a fine edge that at first one doesn't realize the depth and damage of his adroit strokes as he dissects the bland, blind conceits of this all-American family.
Mark Pickell has an eye for mordant black humor, so Capital T's productions fit perfectly into Ken Webster's Hyde Park Theatre -- both into that odd and intimate space and into the ironic, brash, better-than-hip ethos of the place. If you like Ken's stuff, you'll love Mark's. And a further lure: the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago has premiered the last seven works of this playwright. Bruce Norris' savage deadpan flaying of the earnest American …
Review: Boom for Real by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 03, 2012
Let it be said now: the cast is the singular strength of this production, and Noel Gaulin is the primus inter pares.
It was Halloween night and I went to the theatre in costume as I always do. The show was Boom for Real by Jason Tremblay, produced by Paper Chairs. This company has a gift for finding truly unusual but serviceable performance spaces, albeit sometimes hard to find. I tramped through the crushed limestone parking lot of an industrial east Austin construction zone in my wobbly fireman’s boots, uncertain of my balance and vision behind my long-nosed mask …
Review: Ragtime by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 30, 2012
Ragtime is a big production for a big new theatre, one that says, loud and proud, that 'Austin's theatre' offers a level of artistic and technical excellence as good as any in the country.
The Zach's Ragtime is a huge -- I mean HUGE -- and lavish production, inaugurating its state-of-the-art 425-seat Topfer theatre. The flair, finish and finesse of this production are simply breath-taking. Ragtime is a fable of a faraway America, one that existed at the very opening of the twentieth century. In his 1975 novel E.L. Doctorow imagined a tangled story involving a prosperous bourgeois family in New Rochelle, an unmarried African-American couple and their child, and an impoverished …