Recent Reviews
Review: Measure for Measure by American Shakespeare Center touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 29, 2011
The real comic turn in this piece is Denice Burbach as Elbow the constable. She prances, flails, flings malapropisms and expostulates for all the world like Daffy Duck, though without Daffy's juicy speech impediment.
The towering American colonial revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards is remembered today principally for the hair-raising imagery in his 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, including especially his fierce warning, The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy …
Review: As You Like It by American Shakespeare Center touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 25, 2011
The ecstasy of the American Shakespeare Center's staging of As You Like It was that of infatuation, the hypnotic attraction of love.
"Restless Ecstacy," the title of the 2010-2011 tour by American Shakespeare Center players, comes from the Scottish play, III, 2, in which the grim thane uses the phrase to describe his tormented sleeplessness after killing King Duncan. The ASC troupe didn't do their Macbeth at the University of Texas in Austin this week, but their staging of As You Like It corresponded fully to both promises of the tour title. Noise, music, performance and joviality …
Review: Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 18, 2011
The comedy in this piece is actor-driven, dependent on the players' sharpness in establishing the eccentrics. The range is wide.
Neil Simon's set-up for Laughter on the 23rd Floor is simple and classic, if you can abstract from the biographic aspects of it. A newcomer enthusing about his new job discovers that his work colleagues are eccentrics, each more bizarre and devastatingly verbal than the previous one. Their employer, initially unseen, has enormous stature with the public, but they all know that he is a generous, distracted borderline psycho. Set 'em ricocheting off one another, …
Review: Defiant by Debutantes and Vagabonds
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 12, 2011
Brant could have usefully and instructively explored the rich contradictions of resentment and grief suggested by Dawn Erin's performance. But his naive nightmare vision of this country is so astonishingly distant from our reality that it entirely undermines the emotional content.
George Brant's Defiant is bleak and stupid. There, after chewing on it for a week, I have spat it out. Not happily, because this gives me an unbroken record of writing negative reviews about this theatre ensemble. Of the four of their productions I've tracked to date, I missed A Brilliant Revolution and The Virgin with 10,000 Arrows, both of which got respectful reviews. After seeing their May 2009 evening of short works under the …
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, …