Recent Reviews
Review: Steel Magnolias by Sam Bass Community Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 03, 2011
Tickets for the Round Rock hometown production of this hometown comedy-drama are moving briskly. Everyone wants to go down to Truvy's. Even the good ol' boys.
At one point in Robert Harling's mischievous script for Steel Magnolias, set in Truvy's beauty shop in Chinquapin, Louisiana, newly hired perm-and-trim assistant Annelle worries that one of the husbands might intrude into that women's world. Tidily turned out Clairee Beltcher responds, "Oh, those men wouldn't ever come in here. They're afraid that we might be running around nekkid or something." Harling's 1987 play and the 1989 film of Steel Magnolias succeed exactly for that reason. These …
Review: Flying by Breaking String Theater
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 01, 2011
Mukhina, Schmidt and this talented company create a terrific, terrible and hypnotic spectacle for us. Flying is an experience not to be missed.
Olga Mukhina’s Flying is a fast, dangerous and exhilarating ride. Graham Schmidt and Breaking String Theatre put audiences up close to the beautiful youth of post-Soviet Russia in this 2004 piece. Olga Mukhin was one of those who originated the “New Drama” that came raging into Russia's mid-1990’s. Flying plays until February 19 at the Off Center, 2211-A Hidalgo Street (behind Joe’s Bakery on 7th Street). This is the North American premiere. Heedless, hedonistic and rootless, a gang of six …
Review: One Venus Hour by Sheila Gordon
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 30, 2011
The widowed or divorced father, retired alone in Florida, with the querelous mutter and collapsed world of an aged New Yorker, pushes back at his daughter's pained, well-intentioned ministrations.
Equity actor Shela M. Gordon took the opportunity of FronteraFest 2011 to do a solo turn showing friends, the general public and her students at St. Ed's that she's endowed both with an actor's shape shifting wiles and with a warm and thoughtful writer's imagination. Gordon developed this piece with support from Scriptworks, here in Austin. Her One Venus Hour is not about the goddess or even about the planet. It's about time, the final arc …
Review: Cardigan by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 29, 2011
Are we in a classroom or in a fantasy world? The setting is inconsistent, probably intended as ironic, but ultimately unsatisfying.
Maybe a playwright shouldn't act in his own play. Unless, of course, he's one of those comedy yuksters who speaks directly to the audience and makes smartass observations about his own life exeriences and surroundings. Trey Deason, the playwright, plays the lead character in Cardigan, a piece expanded from a well-received 2010 Short Fringe offering. His assumption of that identity may be disconcerting to those who have run into him in so-called real life. …
Review: Agamemnon by City on a Hill* Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 28, 2011
Kimberley Mead as Clytemnestra had impressively mastered the language and joined it to gesture and presence. She gave the queen a lively, alluring murderous intelligence in which every syllable had meaning.
Agamemnon as produced by City on a Hill* Productions and directed by David J. Boss is a satisfyingly crunchy rendition of the first part of Aeschylus' Orestia. In this season of Academy Award nominations it might be useful to note that the trilogy won the annual competition at the Greater Dionysian Festival in Athens in 458 B.C. In a chronological sense it's not "the first play in the Western canon," as stated in the program. Aeschylus wrote …
Review: Howl by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 27, 2011
Dark-eyed with her throaty voice and long mane of dark hair, Harrison could have been one of those beat babes back in the 1950's.
She calls it Howl, after Ginsberg's 1955 poem, but Teresa Harrison greeted her opening night audience with quiet confidentiality, joking and wrestling with a microphone stand as her accompanist Mark Williams caressed his great bass fiddle, painted in 1960's psychedelica. She'd set up a cardboard triptych of quotations out in the lobby, witty or gnomic remarks from Charlie Parker, Mae West, Sartre, Keith Richards and many others, a bartlett's of Ginsberg's century. Dark-eyed with her throaty …