Recent Reviews
Review: Hedda Gabler (for export) by Palindrome Theatre (2010-2013)
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 25, 2011
Robin Grace Thompson's Hedda is a fierce, intelligent, cornered creature, and we watch with fascination as she advances toward the ultimate, explosive ending of the play.
Austin's youngish Palindrome Theatre is on its way to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to perform their new, 90-minute non-stop Hedda Gabler every afternoon from August 5 to 29, except for Wednesdays. Outside those office hours the six-member cast and associates will be free to immerse themselves in the largest international arts event around, now in its 74th year. Last year, for example, Edinburgh offered 2,453 different shows staging 40,254 performances by 21,148 performers in 259 venues. That's a …
Review: Footloose by Zilker Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 19, 2011
Granted, recognized and applauded -- but for a viewer who'd never seen the film or the stage production, the book for Footloose was really, really lame. We're talking Elvis-Presley-movie levels of dumb.
I attended Zilker Theatre Production's Footloose ten days ago on opening weekend, and I'm only just now writing it up. They've got a nice long run -- six weeks, four nights a week -- and an Austin tradition of celebrating the summer that stretches back 53 years. Judging from the full parking lot and the large, cheerful crowd lounging on the slope above the Hillside Theatre, Zilker Productions doesn't need much help in selling the production, either. …
Review: 69 Love Songs by Gnap! Theatre Projects
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on July 14, 2011
It’s in the very nature of improv for the performers to search feverishly for the emotional click with the audience: most often a laugh but sometimes a revelation, a moment of disgust, or a connection of sympathy.
If you scour the liner notes of 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields you will find this admission by writer Stephen Merritt: “I like over-the-top sentimentality if there’s a justification for it.” While this thought is no way to sum up the majesty of his much-beloved indie/emo/pop/retro/folk rock masterpiece album, it is a good way to introduce it. The second necessary detail is that Merritt did not write 69 Love Songs as a collection of songs about love, but …
Review: The Little Dog Laughed by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 13, 2011
The Little Dog Laughed was an unexpected gift, a challenge to convention and a story with heart.
City Theatre Artistic Director Andy Berkovsky had wanted to do Douglas Carter Beane's four-character sex farce since at least mid-2009. The title floated out there on the City's season listings, pending availability of performance rights. When City finally got the rights and ran it for four weeks in June and July, the silence was deafening. Not a single review appeared. The City has faced controversy with equanimity -- a year ago, Paul Ruddick's gay-themed …
Review: No Exit by Chaotic Theatre Company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on July 11, 2011
Director Andrew Black’s No Exit fulfills the promises of the original play while connecting it to a modern audience in a raw and beautiful form.
Death without End Inès slips behind Estelle and coos comfortingly in her ear, gives her promises of faith, sisterhood and protection, and then suddenly she pinches her and shoves her away. . . Estelle cozies up to Garcin and whispers of an endless devotion in the only place that, endless, really has any meaning, then she turns away, haughtily dismissing him. . . Garcin shrugs aside his social predators and affirms his own …
Review: Upon A Midnight Dreary by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 11, 2011
In contrast to those somewhat overstaged pieces, The Tell Tale Heart was direct, convincing and suspenseful. Greg Klein's adaptation takes the principal concept -- the alarming and disorienting effect of heightened aural and visual sensitivity -- and develops it in a completely different context.
Edgar Allan Poe is a deceptively attractive figure for theatre makers. We've all read with a delicious shiver his best-known short stories. His themes of death, madness and mystery are so very elemental that they have never gone out of style. The elaborate early 19th-century style of his poetry may be a challenge, but the simple sardonics of his short stories, often in first person, appeal to our desire for intensity. As long as …