Recent Reviews
Review: Water by Vortex Repertory Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 09, 2012
Anderson Dear is perhaps the Vortex’s boldest singing and performing talent, and she has provided the absolute peak of many Vortex shows with her powerful, clear tones that have never needed amplification.
I bought my ticket and sat in the outside coffee bar, The Butterfly Bar, at the Vortex before seating was called. Late summer concerns seemed to run forcefully to West Nile virus in Texas, as every mode of mosquito repulsion was in full application on the deck as the Saturday night crowd assembled. Inside, these cares buzzed away forever with the first glimpse of the set. Upstage center a waterfall fell like liquid plate glass, …
Review: Cabaret by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 31, 2012
The M.C., relative newcomer to Austin Johann Robert Wood, is absolutely terrific -- an enticing guide to the hells of temptation. Charismatic, muscular, graceful and mocking, he dominates that stage even when it's filled up with quivering pink pulchritude.
It's enticingly easy to imagine yourself away to 1930's Berlin in this staging of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret, for the City Theatre's space creates exactly the right dynamic. There are rules-of-thumb for successful parties. The first involves adequate supplies of liquor, but the second one, in fact the more important, requires fitting the numbers of guests to the room. The City's 85-seat intimate space is exactly right, both as a cabaret world where performers will …
Review: The Twelfth Labor by Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 22, 2012
Stevens' script is densely conceptual, a virtual Cirque de Soleil of intellectual performance, but the story is much less complicated than his working and reworking of it.
If you arrive at the MacTheatre Black Box with happy memories of Leegrid Stevens' The Dudleys as staged last year by Tutto Theatre -- winner of eight of Austin's B. Iden Payne theatre awards -- you may well be disconcerted. The Twelfth Labor, behind its enigmatic title, is as far from the hectic world of 8-bit video games as, say, Eugene O'Neil or William Faulkner. Tutto has mounted a gorgeously moody, intellectually challenging piece, comprised …
Review: Rose Rage by Hidden Room Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 04, 2012
This Rose Rage was a fast-moving, thumping good time with lots of fight choreography, a full team of confident Austin Shakespearians and a couple of superb ringers brought in from the UK on an actor exchange program.
This is Shakespeare that you've never seen before, staged in an "original practices" style and at a court hall venue that the company couldn't possibly duplicate as a commercial production. You're in Austin, Texas, people, the through-the-looking-glass home of theatre practice, and this gem disappeared after a run of only three weeks It walked away with Austin's B. Iden Payne 2011-2012 theatre award for outstanding production of a drama, and director Beth Burns got the …
Review: Tigers Be Still by Hyde Park Theatre
by Catherine Dribb
Published on July 27, 2012
Tigers Be Still will have you falling out of those new comfy chairs at the Hyde Park Theater. It's that good. Wow. Raunchy and redemptive.
Kim Rosenstock’s play Tigers Be Still is a well-woven, touching narrative about family triumph (thread that needle!), tragedy (Bette Midler karaoke is never okay) and of course, tigers. And it will have you falling out of those new comfy chairs at the Hyde Park Theater. It’s that good. With a sick mother upstairs and two sisters trying to get their sh*t together, Tigers Be Still seemed an unusual pick for Hyde Park Theatre after Marion …
Review: Dinner in Dubai by Bernadette Nason
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 11, 2012
Unexpectedly and with a flourish, Nason brings all this learning together and tells us just how this chipper English adventuress wound up in Austin. It's an eminently satisfying account and an outcome for which we can all be grateful.
Bernadette Nason is one of those unexpected treasures who make Austin theatre such a pleasure to explore. I first saw her at the Austin Playhouse in Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward shortly after we arrived in Austin almost five years ago -- before, in fact, the notion of writing about Austin theatre even occurred to me. Bernadette played Madame Arcati, the loony medium who unleashes the spirit world upon the wealthy but hapless author Charles …