Recent Reviews
Review: Mad Forest by Red Dragon Players, Austin High School
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 19, 2010
Pacing is sublime, suggesting a hesitancy, an overcoming and then a willingness to reveal these desires both to themselves and to one another. The act gathers speed and intensity in a crowded family scene including the shocking spectacle of a gleeful re-enactment of the execution of the Ceaucescus
Theatre is a lens. The audience and the players look through the action in the playing space to perceive a story in the collective imagination. That story may be entertaining, or trivial, or profound, and the clarity of the vision is directly affected by the skill of the players and the willingness of the audience to engage. The themes may be familiar. Take vampires, for instance. The century-old thrills of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel …
Review: Mauritius by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 18, 2010
ACC's Mauritius stays firmly on the rails, with more than one sudden twist. Director Shelby Brammer keeps her cast at speed and they deliver that satisfying dénouement. There's a reason that the form of the well-made play has lasted so long.
Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius is in many aspects a well-made play, fitting neatly into the 19th- and early-20th century tradition in the United Kingdom and in France (there, as une pièce bien faite). Cribbing quickly from Wikipedia, that Cliff's Notes of the Internet, one gets the reminder that the well-made play has a strong neoclassical flavour, involving a very tight plot and a climax that takes place very close to the end of the story, with most of the story taking place …
Review: Incorruptible by Paradox Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 13, 2010
Our monks contemplate the resources available to them in their own sanctified ground and, inevitably, they find the justification for going into the bone-exporting business big time. That's the basic joke of this show.
This cheery little satire might well have been titled Incorruptible - Men in Robes, marking a link to the comic style of the frankly inimitable Mel Brooks. As was always the case in Brooks' hysterical historical spoofs, the intent wasn't so much to portray the epoch as to emphasize that the seven deadly sins have always been with us -- particularly those of greed, envy and lust, the ones most likely to make us act in …
Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 11, 2010
This is an evening to be enjoyed and remembered, one of clever, lively action, beautiful players and knockabout clowns, exquisite renaissance music, masques and costume.
A Midsummer Night's Dream may well be Shakespeare's most familiar comedy. In his review of Austin theatre for the World Theatre Day celebration last April Robert Faires noted it as one of those plays that "circle round again and again like pop songs in heavy rotation." You have to admit it: he's right. The Tex-Arts youth program did the show ten days before his remarks, then Austin Shakespeare did it in Zilker Park with 1960's style …
Review: Secondary Cause of Death by Sam Bass Community Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 10, 2010
If you’re familiar with the Sam Bass theatre, by all means, turn out and smile. If you’re not, well, wait until next time; Peter Gordon’s Secondary Cause of Death isn’t an example of their best.
The Sam Bass players put their energy and ingenuity into Peter Gordon’s Secondary Cause of Death and I did get some smiles from it. The Round Rock thespian crew under Lynn Beaver's direction were performing the equivalent of CPR on a piece that probably should have been selected for unfavorable triage at a much earlier date. With this play the British playwright wrote the second in his “Inspector Pratt” trilogy, a follow-up to his Murdered to …
Review: Noises Off by Way Off Broadway Community Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 02, 2010
Emotions are high and farcical confusion is everywhere as the now familiar figures of this oddball cast battle one another in semi-silence. It's a precisely performed and choreographed madness.
The Way Off Broadway Community Players in Leander are celebrating their spacious new locale by turning the theatre inside out with laughter. Literally. Michael Frayn's Noises Off is a lively amusement that pokes good-hearted fun at the conventions of the stage, starting with the most basic one: the agreement that we in the audience will accept you, the actors, as the characters that you are pretending to represent. You settle into your comfortable seat in the …