Recent Reviews
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …