Recent Reviews
Review: Putting It Together by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 28, 2011
Putting It Together has the polish and sharpness of cabaret, transforming the unadorned utilitarian lecture hall at the ACC Northridge campus at least temporarily into a window on a New York state of mind.
This is Sondheim song season. Not just because 81-year-old master incarnates the tunesmanship of Broadway of the last 50 years, but because his tunes and music so deftly capture the dreams of those sophisticates who have populated his audiences. Yes, his breakthrough was as the lyricist for West Side Story, but as this compendium song performance illustrates, Stephen Sondheim portrayed with wit and acumen the sentimental lives of Americans. Dr. Jimmy Shepherd of Austin Community …
Review: I Love You Because by Penfold Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 28, 2011
If bartenders are so worldly wise and encouraging, why don't they rule the world? And when it all comes down to making the Big Hard Choice, is the rules-follower going to follow his game plan or follow his heart? (No points for guessing that one right!)
Michael McKelvey set up his collaboration with Penfold Theatre and Andrew Cannata six months or more in advance, long before the announcement that he will be leaving Austin for Pennsylvania this coming fall. Remembering their previous successes Five Years,Three Days of Rain and John and Jen, I arranged specially to return early from a family celebration in Houston in order to catch the show on Sunday, June 19. When we turned up at the Hyde …
Review: Too Many Husbands by Different Stages
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on June 27, 2011
Martina Ohlhauser breathes life into a potentially two-dimensional character. She is charming as she whines, enticing as she lies, and entertaining as she grandstands about her own constant self-sacrifice.
Too Many Laughs The program for Different Stages’ production of Too Many Husbands provides a page-long biography of the author, W. Somerset Maugham, best remembered today as a novelist. Here one may learn that Maugham worked as an obstetrician in the slums of London, joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver at the age of forty and went on to become a secret service agent for British Military Intelligence. This is perhaps to inject …
Review: The Book of Grace by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 24, 2011
I glimpsed an on-line comment that The Book of Grace "delivers a punch in the gut." Hmm. Maybe. What I recall is the subdued ironic comment heard behind me as I exited the theatre: "Well, that was certainly an uplifting evening, wasn't it?"
The marketing strategy of putting the playwright on the poster bothers me. It's a feeling made all the sharper by the Zach Theatre's importing of MacArthur 'Genius Grantee' Suzan-Lori Parks twice over the past six months for sessions entitled "Watch Me Work." The public was invited to watch Parks write -- at a desk? on a computer? on a yellow legal pad? -- for most of an hour, following which she had an exchange with …
Review: Uncle Vanya by Breaking String Theater
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on June 20, 2011
Yet, a lively and direct translation is just one of the few things this production has to offer. The set design and the lighting are bewitching. Breaking String transforms the austere confines of the Off Center into a virtual diorama of the life of the Russian nobility of the 1890’s.
The Tragedy of the Individual “Why am I old?” shouts Uncle Vanya about mid-way through the play bearing his name. He doesn’t ask anyone in particular and he doesn’t expect an answer. It is a statement, a question, an interjection as well as a plea. Perhaps he’s speaking to himself, perhaps to his family and perhaps to God. He is forlorn, lost, meandering and, at best, seeking answers to questions he’s always wanted to ask. …
Review: Independence by Paradox Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 18, 2011
Independence moves quickly, draws us into its vivid little world and convinces us of the vitality of each of these women. Blessing recreates the heart pangs of growing up and the regrets of the family that never really existed.
Independence, first staged in 1983, is one of the earliest of Lee Blessing's theatre works. It's a tidy, well constructed box-set play that announces its theme open-faced with the very title. The fact that the setting is Independence, Iowa, misleads no one. That speck on the map, population of about 5,500, stands for AnyTown, USA, or at least, AnySmallTown, USA. Blessing probably started with a schematic diagram: small town, an intermittently crazy mother, three daughters …