Recent Reviews
Review: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 16, 2011
This show won't give you much to ponder, but it will keep throwing things at you until you laugh and smile.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is set in a mythic French Riviera, a delirious paradise that seems to be populated only by rich Americans, a couple of rival American con artists, and one charmingly corrupt French police chief. It's a concept that would make the French laugh out loud. Not that they don't have their own share of nutty cinematic visions, including le vieux Far West, but because this is Cannes as the returned GIs imagined it. Or Monte Carlo …
Review: Carousel by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 14, 2011
Carousel is a gorgeous thing out of another time. The story is simple. So are the characters, who for the most part good folk of the land, just as in Oklahoma!, the hit just two years earlier by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Carousel is a gorgeous thing out of another time. The story is simple. So are the characters, who for the most part good folk of the land, just as in Oklahoma!, the hit just two years earlier by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Carousel is a story of courting, disappointment in marriage between carnival tough Billy Bigelowe and bright-eyed local girl Julie Jordan, a robbery attempt and the bad end of the Bigelowe, then, unexpectedly, a counseling session in …
Review: August: Osage County by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 12, 2011
Tennessee Williams was a dour idealist. Letts, in contrast, is a nihilist whose message is that our American culture is rotting at its heart. He's a man of black humors entertaining us in a wasteland.
Director Dave Steakley proves that with a first-rate cast and a gifted scenic designer he can turn Tracey Letts' savage misanthropy into a mesmerizing long evening in the theatre. That's no modest achievement. The last -- and first -- Letts work I saw was Capital T Theatre's Killer Joe, which I found violent and obscene. Not in the sexual sense, but because Letts took such evident pleasure in degrading his working-class characters. Perhaps Letts is easier …
Review: Incident at Vichy by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 10, 2011
The reluctant accessory to the murder machine, the fully human and aware victim, the despairing exponent of German-speaking decency and moral feeling. . . Miller's accomplishment is to make them characters of dimension and prototypes of millions involved in the still incomprehensible atrocities.
The black box on the fourth floor has a claustrophobic feel. The central space is stark and looks more like a basement than an attic -- a couple of benches, neutral gray walls, a narrow high window, a couple of empty beer bottles left on the sill. As you gather and settle into the ranks of seats around that central space, the theatre serenades you with recordings of French music -- Jacques Brel, an anachronism, …
Review: Ain't Misbehavin' by Tex-Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 06, 2011
The performers could have dropped out of a 1930's movie reel. Your atention will be captured by the mini-dramas of Waller's songs, staged in various combinations of performers and in fact accumulating a greater sense and even a narrative.
Ain't Misbehavin' is a lively and exciting all-music evening at Tex-Arts, Lakeway, a Fats Waller "musical show" as promised in the subtitle. You might for one brief moment think that you were in a welcoming dive in Harlem, east St. Louis or the South Side of Chicago, as those five attractive and energetic performers and four-piece band sing, dance and blast away in the close quarters of the Kam and James Morris theatre out in Lakeway. …
Review: The Story Seekers by Exchange Artists
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 04, 2011
The grove of shelter has features of death, of memory, of limbo and of simple mythos or story telling -- perhaps those children exist only because we imagine them.
The Elizabeth Ney museum on E. 44th Street in Hyde Park is already haunted. A crowd of stark white plaster figures and busts stand in the shabby shaddows of the odd small Austin-stone castle that was Ney's final residence and studio from 1902 to 1907. Among them is a bust of German writer and philologist Jacob Grimm that she sculpted of the old man in Berlin in the 1850's. Grimm would have approved of …