Recent Reviews
Review: West Side Story by touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 30, 2011
No film can give the scope and the dazzle of Robbins' large dance scenes, and the choreography reproduced by Joey McKneely for this staging delivers excitement, humor and far more action than your eye can follow.
A stage jammed with more than 30 trim, talented dancers, a 15-piece orchestra doing Leonard Bernstein's instantly recognizable score, a couple of memorable scenic pieces and a respectful interpretation of the 1957 reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet, tweaked only very slightly, if at all -- the touring company of West Side Story delivers exactly what the American public expects. The enterprise also provides an enlightening illustration of the difference between a film -- who hasn't seen and been …
Review: Alvida and the Airship Pirates by Weird City Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 30, 2011
Our Alvida is a princess betrothed against her will to a vain and clueless prince from a nearby realm; Chris Romani as Mommy the queen is a sourpuss and Daddy the king is a timorous wimp. The needs of high politics and allilance must be served at all costs.
I was on the last airship with Alvida out of Weird City on March 12 and as sometimes happens with scribes errant, I got too busy and distracted to send her, author John Carroll and their band of adventurers a proper bread-and-butter note. Your mother may have admonished you about good manners, as does the mother of my children. It’s never too late, although sometimes it’s too late to do much good. I prefer the …
Review: Measure for Measure by American Shakespeare Center touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 29, 2011
The real comic turn in this piece is Denice Burbach as Elbow the constable. She prances, flails, flings malapropisms and expostulates for all the world like Daffy Duck, though without Daffy's juicy speech impediment.
The towering American colonial revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards is remembered today principally for the hair-raising imagery in his 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, including especially his fierce warning, The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy …
Review: As You Like It by American Shakespeare Center touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 25, 2011
The ecstasy of the American Shakespeare Center's staging of As You Like It was that of infatuation, the hypnotic attraction of love.
"Restless Ecstacy," the title of the 2010-2011 tour by American Shakespeare Center players, comes from the Scottish play, III, 2, in which the grim thane uses the phrase to describe his tormented sleeplessness after killing King Duncan. The ASC troupe didn't do their Macbeth at the University of Texas in Austin this week, but their staging of As You Like It corresponded fully to both promises of the tour title. Noise, music, performance and joviality greeted the audience …
Review: Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 18, 2011
The comedy in this piece is actor-driven, dependent on the players' sharpness in establishing the eccentrics. The range is wide.
Neil Simon's set-up for Laughter on the 23rd Floor is simple and classic, if you can abstract from the biographic aspects of it. A newcomer enthusing about his new job discovers that his work colleagues are eccentrics, each more bizarre and devastatingly verbal than the previous one. Their employer, initially unseen, has enormous stature with the public, but they all know that he is a generous, distracted borderline psycho. Set 'em ricocheting off one another, bring the …
Review: Defiant by Debutantes and Vagabonds
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 12, 2011
Brant could have usefully and instructively explored the rich contradictions of resentment and grief suggested by Dawn Erin's performance. But his naive nightmare vision of this country is so astonishingly distant from our reality that it entirely undermines the emotional content.
George Brant's Defiant is bleak and stupid. There, after chewing on it for a week, I have spat it out. Not happily, because this gives me an unbroken record of writing negative reviews about this theatre ensemble. Of the four of their productions I've tracked to date, I missed A Brilliant Revolution and The Virgin with 10,000 Arrows, both of which got respectful reviews. After seeing their May 2009 evening of short works under the title Are You Alive? which featured …