Recent Reviews
Review: The Crucible by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2012
Fully physically mature Equity actors occupy the key roles in The Crucible, helping to establish the rhythm, tension and impact. Among the student actors in this cast, Johnny Joe Trillayes and Sophia Franzella rise to the same level.
One measure of the power of Arthur Miller's drama about the Salem witch trials of 1692 is the startling transformation of familiar actors. Tiny Sophia Franzella, now a junior at St. Edward's, has charmed audiences with her wildly comic and mischievous personae in The Imaginary Invalid, Urinetown and A Year with Frog and Toad. Here, as the malicious and vindictive accuser Abigail Williams, Franzella is smooth faced duplicity, a murderous woman-child driven by spite and lust. Hers is a …
Review: Hamlet by Sam Bass Community Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 22, 2012
In a play that at its heart is about uncertainties and indecision this Hamlet has the bounce of a Marvel Comics hero. No 'inky cloak' for him and never the slightest touch of black, either.
Why climb a mountain? Because it's there. Sam Bass Community Theatre in Round Rock is a small, hard working group of friends who know their public and regularly serve up dramatic fare that's been tested and approved in the community kitchens across the country. Those Futrelle sisters of the mythical small town of Fayro, Texas, imagined by the trio of Hope, Jones and Wooten, for example; or other kinder and more thoughtful staples of middle …
Review: Lend Me A Tenor by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2012
Director Todd Martin sets a fine fast clip to this action and displays a keen understanding for the pictorial impact in farce of clever movement and positioning of his actors.
Ken Ludwig's Lend Me A Tenor is one of those 'sure fire' inventions beloved of theatre companies across the world. Since the 1986 debut in London it has been translated into 16 languages and produced in 25 countries. The Gaslight Baker Theatre is currently staging a vivid and funny production of this farce, a fable of mistaken identities, dizzy romance and worldly sophistication. Aspiring timidity meets bravado, and bigger-than-life Italian passions transform smaller-than-life American provincials. The …
Review: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by Renaissance Guild
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 12, 2012
The audience on opening night hung on every word and there were audible gasps at particularly dramatic or unexpected turns in the musicians' exchanges with one another.
San Antonio's Renaissance Guild has put a powerful interpretation of August Wilson's 1984 Ma Rainey's Black Bottom on the makeshift stage at the Little Carver Civic Center. This is the only one of the ten plays in Wilson's "Pittsburgh cycle" depicting African-American lives across the twentieth century that is not, in fact, set in Pittsburgh. The locale is Sturdyvant's shabby recording studio in Chicago in the mid-1920's, where the impatient record distributor is waiting for the idolized blues …
Review: Arcadia by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 09, 2012
Georgia McLeland is a natural -- perfectly in mastery of her character, playful and thoughtful by turns and entirely convincing. Our hearts go out to her as we watch her quiet delight at her first and last waltz with Septimus in the final scene.
Tom Stoppard's Arcadia shines with wit and whimsicality. The dialogues between these characters are so quick and clever that sometimes you perch on the edge of your seat, breathlessly holding back your laughter so that you won't miss a single syllable. This is wit writ deep -- in the characters, their contrasting views of the world and their social positions; in dissembling, feuding and courtship; and in the juxtaposition and then the overlapping within the same genteel …
Review: Next to Normal by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 07, 2012
Zach's staging of the Tom Kitt/Brian Yorkey work Next to Normal is stunning -- but not in the usual reviewer-speak meaning of the word.
Zach's staging of the Tom Kitt/Brian Yorkey work Next to Normal is stunning -- but not in the usual reviewer-speak meaning of the word. The intensity of the emotion, the huge volume of sound, the zig-zag of florescent lighting on the back walls of the set and above all the pitiless focus upon the mental illness of a suburban wife and mother -- all of these foster a numbness of mind that leaves you feeling as if …