Recent Reviews
Review: Messenger No. 4 by Cambiare Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 05, 2012
It's high spirited foolery, and you can almost hear Snider exclaiming, "Yeah, and wouldn't it be neat if -- ??" There are plenty of funny but extraneous bits.
And here's the other fraternal twin of the Paper Moon Rep/Cambiare collaboration. ALT always regrets writing 'after the fact' pieces. There's something laudable about setting things down for the historical record, but a theatre friend used regularly to disparage such essays as 'useless reviews.' Perhaps less so in this case. These compatible personalities and theatre companies carried out a new and successful strategy of production. At a time when others are talking about cooperation …
Review: The 21 Would-Be Lives of Phineas Hamm by Paper Moon Repertory
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 01, 2012
Phineas learns that by pulling a lever he can arbitrarily enter into a completely new reality, finding himself in new circumstances with new relationships.
Nurtured together, produced in tandem and presented as a double bill at the Blue Theatre, Paper Moon's Phineas Hamm and Cambiare's Messenger No. 4 have surprisingly little in common. They appear the same evening in another of Ia Instera's intricately imagined sets but otherwise they're different in style, in concept, costuming and cast. Fraternal twins couldn't be more different. What they do share, however, is a wistful belief in the power of the stage to alter the ordinary, …
Review: Civilization (All You Can Eat) by Salvage Vanguard Theater
by Catherine Dribb
Published on February 28, 2012
The audience meets the first character, a hog, played by the talented Jude Hickey. And the rest is, well, an unveiling not only of hogs but also of porn stars, bigots, directors, hippies, self-help-book authors and (of course) actors.
It’s strange. The concept is great, but the play is strange. Just a warning. The show opens with actors engaged in movement who quickly scatter when the initial dialogue begins, and the audience meets the first character, a hog, played by the talented Jude Hickey. And the rest is, well, an unveiling not only of hogs but also of porn stars, bigots, directors, hippies, self-help-book authors and (of course) actors. It’s a …
Review: Proof by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 27, 2012
'Proof' only hints at mathematical proofs. More importantly, it offers us the search for proof in a more judicial sense -- the messy accumulation of facts, testimony and human interactions to establish, beyond a reasonable doubt, a version of reality.
David Auburn's Proof plays with the audience, cannily withholding elements essential to the story taking place before our eyes in a back garden, adjacent to the University of Chicago. The first of those elements arrives after a lengthy gentle conversation between a relaxed, reassuring professor of mathematics and his earnest, worried daughter. Similar to an instruction to divide by the square root of -1, it obliges new rules upon us, sending us off into the world of …
Review: Love in Pine by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 24, 2012
The central obsessive incident is on the poster: on their way to their high school prom, with arrangements in place for post-dance coitus, the couple crashes against a huge pine tree -- the same one where they carved their joined initials when they were thirteen years old.
Gary Jaffe's Love in Pine is a coming-of-age story, a coming-out story and a fable with a tree spirit and ghosts, all this with multiple realities and time periods anchored in the fictitious town of Pine, Texas at a time of conflagrations. This is unmistakably Bastrop, at about the time that Jaffe left Yale Drama School to return to his hometown of Austin. One wonders uneasily how much of this is auto-therapy, considering that a central character …
Review: Midlife! the crisis musical by Tex-Arts
by Catherine Dribb
Published on February 23, 2012
While it’s clever and funny, Mid-Life! can be hard to stomach at times, let alone watch. But at least both genders get what’s coming to them.
Mid-Life!, the Crisis Musical, presented by TexArts for only one more weekend, is a funny, witty piece about colorful characters and the crises they face. Brothers Bob and Jim Walton wrote book, music, and lyrics for this musical review with no plot other than scenes of the characters as they progress (and digress) through their mid-lives. Mid-Life! features six outstanding cast members directed by Lenny Daniel, bringing talent to Lakeway from Dripping Springs, Austin and Georgetown! If …