Recent Reviews
Review: Bug by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 23, 2010
Kate Debuys again shows herself as an intelligent, perceptive and fearless actress. She and the contained, fierce Joey Hood court and interact throughout this piece, building to a mutually reinforcing frenzy.
Tracy Letts is hard to take. Any playwright is something of a god, sitting before that first blank page with the power to create and mold character and situation. Letts gives us the polarization of that Genesis -- evidently fascinated by the dark and the desperate, he crafts characters beaten down by one another, trapped in poverty, deprived of education and understanding, aching for meaning. He endows them with life, vivid relations and back stories …
Review: Sycorax by Weird Sisters Women's Theater Collective
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 22, 2010
Playwright Todd and director Christa French move these characters between the realm of the physical and that of the spiritual. We do not know whether Ariel is a mere fevered imagining for Sycorax or a familiar spirit with powers.
. . . . Hast thou forgotThe foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envyWas grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her? The Tempest opens with a brief scene of desperation, with sailors and passengers struggling against an overwhelming storm. Following that vivid moment, in Act I, Scene 2 Shakespeare gives us a full measure of background and exposition. He paints a huge and vivid canvas. Prospero reviews for his daughter Miranda …
Review: Grease by Emily Ann Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 17, 2010
These characters will continue to exist in our imaginations and in their never-never land, especially when they're revived by stagings as smooth, happy and professional as this one.
The EmilyAnn Theatre in Wimberley is not outside space and time, although from Austin you're going to take a leisurely 45-minute drive through the hill country to get there. And Wimberley may be in ranch land, but it's anything but rural. Witness the presence there of two lively and effective theatre organizations, the EmilyAnn with its outdoor amphitheatre and the Wimberley Players in their snug playhouse on Old Kyle Road. Rather, it's Grease that stands outside …
Review: Fashion, the High-Style Musical by Sam Bass Community Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 15, 2010
The Sam Bass, as a community theatre, interpreted Off Broadway spoofing amateur theatre reviving early American drama. One might recall one of those halls of repeating mirrors.
Director Frank Benge and the cast of Fashion at the Sam Bass Community Theatre played a happy triple bluff May 29 to June 12. The base text of this staging is Anna Cora Mowatt's play Fashion, or New York Society. First performed in 1845, it did not rise above the standards of the day. It's a boilerplate melodrama complete with a conniving con-man passing himself off as foreign nobility and with an ingénue playing the orphaned serving girl who's …
Review: Lysistrata by Chaotic Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 10, 2010
Chaotic Theatre's Lysistrata is an intriguing two-speed interpretation. The thesis -- never really exploited or completely explained -- is that the events we are witnessing take place in some undefined future time.
Lysistrata is a surprise in the compact canon of Greek drama. It's Aristophanes' clever satire of two usually unassociated aspects of manliness -- the male as warrior and the male as lover. Swordsmen in each case, although of quite different aspect. There's a historical context of great seriousness to it involving wars between Greek city states in B.C. 413. That may partly explain why this text was awarded only third place in the theatrical competition …
Review: Machinal by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 09, 2010
The pivotal scene between Crossno and Gabriel Luna, playing the casual seducer wafted with the winds of freedom and disengagement, is a beautifully understated passage, completely convincing in portraying the allure of this affair embraced by the young wife and mother.
This production of Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, currently playing at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, is a memorable staging of a 1928 shocker -- which in 21st century terms means that it is endearingly two dimensional. Back in the 1920's,most American theatre art was unexciting, conventional or cast in moral platitudes. At the same time, newspaper reporting of crimes was sensationalistic and very big business. In a time when both radio and cinema were still new, big …