Recent Reviews
Review: Richard III by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2013
Veteran actor Eugene Lee swaggers, glowers and rebukes -- but by addressing us from the first, he turns us into his unwilling confederates. At his most duplicitous moments he gives us a canny glance to reassure us that he's not abandoning his embrace of evil.
Richard III is a portrait of a monster. He's a killer, more forthright than Iago and without a shred of the scruples of Macbeth. This is the protagonist who tells us he's going to court a grieving royal widow as she stands over her husband's body "though I kill'd her husband and her father," and achieves that impossibility. She agrees to marry him. Richard III was the portrait of a sociopath before the diagnosis was …
Review: STRIKE: I Am The Machine Gunner AND Martial Arts by Breaking String Theater
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on February 16, 2013
Any traces of nobility, socialistic brotherhood or love for Mother Russia have been washed out in the poverty and desperation of a nascent capitalist world of gangsters, corrupt cops, drug and alcohol abuse, Western films, and acting cool in the face of adversity.
Ambitious Desperation: A Look at Two Plays by Yury Klavdiev “I was spread-eagled on the sand: catching my breath. My overheated machine gun was lying next to me; it was catching its breath too.” The audience might indeed envy the machine gun’s respite as it is whirled along the riveting and volatile tale of a street thug appraising his life in terms of his hopes and his heritage in Yury Klavdiev’s one man opus, I …
Review: Other Desert Cities by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 14, 2013
In an age when 'dysfunctional' all too often is appended to 'American family' in the U.S. theatre, Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities spends much of its two acts appearing to explore yet another meltdown. Lyman and Polly Wyeth are prosperous California retirees with backgrounds in Hollywood and Republican politics. Their children are several sorts of messes. The older son got into drugs and then into political violence, getting implicated in a deadly firebombing before …
Review: STRIKE: I Am The Machine Gunner AND Martial Arts by Breaking String Theater
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 11, 2013
Since the fall of the U.S.S.R. Russian playwrights have focused not on politics but on the dark side of capitalism and its new avenues for crime.
The third annual New Russian Drama Festival in Austin, organized and hosted by Breaking String Theatre Company and its artistic director, Graham Schmidt, offered a full weekend of theatre to Austin, with impressive guests, panel discussions, staged readings, a musical program and full stage presentations of two world-class one-act plays by the preeminent contemporary playwright Yury Klavdiev. My first and last impressions are that Austin is fortunate indeed simply to have access to such theatrical …
Review: Design for Living by Austin Shakespeare
by Christine El-Tawil
Published on February 11, 2013
Despite the speed of the exchanges and the posh accents, not one joke or pun was lost on the audience. The shifts between tense drama moments to absurdly lighthearted funny ones deeply engaged us.
Kara Bliss greets you with song as you enter the Rollins Studio Theater at the Long Center for Austin Shakespeare’s production of Design for Living by Noël Coward. Jason Connor accompanies her on the upright piano. Bliss’s soulful delivery of witty and fun compositions by Coward instantly transports you to the 1920’s. The puns and clever humor set the audience laughing even before the action began, particularly with references to “gay” behavior. In Coward’s time, …
Review: 33 Variations by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 08, 2013
As world-class pianist Anton Nel performs those intricate, vigorous variations, the rest of the show plays out before him like music hall scenes, tear jerkers and clown numbers.
In 1819 Viennese music publisher Anton Diabelli invited many of the leading musicians of the Habsburg empire to compose a variation upon a simple waltz of his own devising. Profits from the project were to be contributed to support orphans and widows of soldiers killed in the Napoleonic wars. Ludwig von Beethoven initially declined to contribute, then changed his mind. He eventually penned 33 variations, over several years, which Diabelli published as a separate volume …