Recent Reviews
Review: Troilus and Cressida by Austin Shakespeare Youth Troupe
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 05, 2011
Shakespeare's sour vision of courtship and courtly honor is so off-putting, however, that a single unsuspecting hearing of the text could leave one confused and deceived.
Although the performance took place in the idyllic lakeside setting for The Curtain Theatre, Troilus and Cressida was no picnic. Austin Shakespeare put this summer's 16-member Young Shakespeare teen troupe into one of Shakespeare's grimmest and most cynical works. The epic characters of Homer's Iliad manifest gallantry and heroic courtesy, and the Trojan lovebirds Troilus and Cressida, grafted from medieval courtly romances via Chaucer, plunge into oaths and carnal pleasure. But the guiding spirits here are lechery in the …
Review: Anything Goes by Lee Colee Studios
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 29, 2011
Colée with assistant director Rachel McGuiness and other staffers brought these youngsters to an enthusiastic pitch, moving them with energy and precision. The set was simple but apt and perfectly well decorated.
The 'Broadway Bound' theatre boot camps run in Wimberley each summer by Lee Colée have become so popular that for the just-completed production of Cole Porter's 1934 musical comedy Anything Goes, she was instructing and directing a cast of 39 young persons ranging in age from 8 to 18. The turnout was so strong that she took the initiative of organizing the players into different configurations for "odd" performance dates (with the older players in the …
Review: I Love You Because by Penfold Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 28, 2011
If bartenders are so worldly wise and encouraging, why don't they rule the world? And when it all comes down to making the Big Hard Choice, is the rules-follower going to follow his game plan or follow his heart? (No points for guessing that one right!)
Michael McKelvey set up his collaboration with Penfold Theatre and Andrew Cannata six months or more in advance, long before the announcement that he will be leaving Austin for Pennsylvania this coming fall. Remembering their previous successes Five Years,Three Days of Rain and John and Jen, I arranged specially to return early from a family celebration in Houston in order to catch the show on Sunday, June 19. When we turned up at the Hyde Park Theatre, …
Review: Putting It Together by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 28, 2011
Putting It Together has the polish and sharpness of cabaret, transforming the unadorned utilitarian lecture hall at the ACC Northridge campus at least temporarily into a window on a New York state of mind.
This is Sondheim song season. Not just because 81-year-old master incarnates the tunesmanship of Broadway of the last 50 years, but because his tunes and music so deftly capture the dreams of those sophisticates who have populated his audiences. Yes, his breakthrough was as the lyricist for West Side Story, but as this compendium song performance illustrates, Stephen Sondheim portrayed with wit and acumen the sentimental lives of Americans. Dr. Jimmy Shepherd of Austin Community …
Review: Too Many Husbands by Different Stages
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on June 27, 2011
Martina Ohlhauser breathes life into a potentially two-dimensional character. She is charming as she whines, enticing as she lies, and entertaining as she grandstands about her own constant self-sacrifice.
Too Many Laughs The program for Different Stages’ production of Too Many Husbands provides a page-long biography of the author, W. Somerset Maugham, best remembered today as a novelist. Here one may learn that Maugham worked as an obstetrician in the slums of London, joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver at the age of forty and went on to become a secret service agent for British Military Intelligence. This is perhaps to inject a …
Review: The Book of Grace by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 24, 2011
I glimpsed an on-line comment that The Book of Grace "delivers a punch in the gut." Hmm. Maybe. What I recall is the subdued ironic comment heard behind me as I exited the theatre: "Well, that was certainly an uplifting evening, wasn't it?"
The marketing strategy of putting the playwright on the poster bothers me. It's a feeling made all the sharper by the Zach Theatre's importing of MacArthur 'Genius Grantee' Suzan-Lori Parks twice over the past six months for sessions entitled "Watch Me Work." The public was invited to watch Parks write -- at a desk? on a computer? on a yellow legal pad? -- for most of an hour, following which she had an exchange with …