Recent Reviews
Review: You Wouldn't Know Him/Her, He/She Lives in Austin/Edinburgh (March) by Hidden Room Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 11, 2011
The Austin-London production uses a boy-meets-girl story with not a lot of nuance. Actors working their respective audiences had the opportunity to create and maintain character, but it appeared they were spinning that cloth from a very short supply of thread.
Artists are intrigued by the possibilities of social media, a fascination that they share with commercial enterprises, institutions, marketing strategists and your old granny. (In 2010-2011 the share of the U.S. over-55's on Facebook quadrupled to 9.5%, because of a more than nine-foldincrease in their numbers, to just under 10 million creaky Facebook boomers.) It's no surprise that Austin with its happily volatile mixture of knowledge industries and creatives is exploring that fuzzy junction of …
Review: Top Dog/Underdog by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 10, 2011
Romeo is tall, tense and cerebral. McArthur Moore as his younger brother Booth is a bouncy, jivy, arrogant womanizer who dreams of dazzling the marks in the three-card-monte scam.
You have missed an extraordinary experience. Almost all of you. Lisa Jordan's staging of Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks takes place this evening and then three more times, and then it's gone forever. Yes, I didn't get to the City Theatre production until late in the run. That wasn't willful neglect but just a queueing problem. I have a season ticket to the City, but there is so much theatre in Austin, much of it unusual, innovative …
Review: On the Verge (or The Georgraphy of Longing) by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 08, 2011
Overmyer's dialogue is often as rich as blank verse, deserving of a good tasting in the mouth, but Long and his players are usually moving too fast to let us savor it.
"Bebe Rebozo!" Those two words summarize the wit and triviality of Eric Overmyers' On the Verge (or The Geography of Longing), now playing at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward's University. I laughted at the sudden illumination of an impression from 40 years ago. Bebe Rebozo - Richard Nixon's buddy. The Florida banker. The guy with the home in Key Biscayne where our Darth Vader president took refuge from the demands of …
Review: Hedda Gabler (adapted) by Palindrome Theatre (2010-2013)
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 05, 2011
Nigel O'Hearn faithfully follows the mechanics of Ibsen's intrigue in this version. His principal innovation is the pungent contemporary language he gives these characters.
Hedda Gabler puzzled and annoyed audiences across Europe when it was first staged in 1890 and 1891 -- pretty much the same reaction Ibsen had elicited with most of his later plays. He was 61 when he wrote this one, exasperated with the bourgeois public that went to the theatre and purchased copies of his plays. The last lines of the play are spoken by Judge Brack, that worldly sybarite who took Hedda's husband George …
Review: Evita by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 03, 2011
The voices are superb, the leads are very well cast both for appearance and for presence, and as usual the Palace fills the stage up with action, spectacle and dance. Movement is swift and convincing, and the director and cast make very good use of the turntable at center stage.
Evita offers not only the Georgetown Palace's usual high standards of performance, but also something more: a deglamorization of the Lloyd Webber/Rice tragic fairy tale. Eva Duarte de Perón came from almost literally nowhere -- from a provincial Argentine town where she was one of several illegitimate children of a wealthy rancher. She became leading lady, first lady and "Spiritual Leader of the Nation." Lloyd Webber's score and Tim Rice's libretto have furnished us …
Review: Fiction by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 24, 2011
The plot turns are artful but I found myself wondering why I should care at all. The Watermans are irretrievably shallow.
The University of Texas at Austin with its ambitious program for drama and playwriting is fortunate to have hired the prolific Steven Dietz away from Seattle. On the evidence of the four Dietz plays staged here over the last couple of years, he possesses a sure sense of craft as well as an understanding of the hazy dreams of middle class America. The Zach Theatre chose to feature Dietz himself in its promotional …