Recent Reviews
Review: On the Verge (or The Georgraphy of Longing) by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 08, 2011
Overmyer's dialogue is often as rich as blank verse, deserving of a good tasting in the mouth, but Long and his players are usually moving too fast to let us savor it.
"Bebe Rebozo!" Those two words summarize the wit and triviality of Eric Overmyers' On the Verge (or The Geography of Longing), now playing at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward's University. I laughted at the sudden illumination of an impression from 40 years ago. Bebe Rebozo - Richard Nixon's buddy. The Florida banker. The guy with the home in Key Biscayne where our Darth Vader president took refuge from the demands of office. …
Review: Hedda Gabler (adapted) by Palindrome Theatre (2010-2013)
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 05, 2011
Nigel O'Hearn faithfully follows the mechanics of Ibsen's intrigue in this version. His principal innovation is the pungent contemporary language he gives these characters.
Hedda Gabler puzzled and annoyed audiences across Europe when it was first staged in 1890 and 1891 -- pretty much the same reaction Ibsen had elicited with most of his later plays. He was 61 when he wrote this one, exasperated with the bourgeois public that went to the theatre and purchased copies of his plays. The last lines of the play are spoken by Judge Brack, that worldly sybarite who took Hedda's husband George …
Review: Evita by Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 03, 2011
The voices are superb, the leads are very well cast both for appearance and for presence, and as usual the Palace fills the stage up with action, spectacle and dance. Movement is swift and convincing, and the director and cast make very good use of the turntable at center stage.
Evita offers not only the Georgetown Palace's usual high standards of performance, but also something more: a deglamorization of the Lloyd Webber/Rice tragic fairy tale. Eva Duarte de Perón came from almost literally nowhere -- from a provincial Argentine town where she was one of several illegitimate children of a wealthy rancher. She became leading lady, first lady and "Spiritual Leader of the Nation." Lloyd Webber's score and Tim Rice's libretto have furnished us with …
Review: Fiction by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 24, 2011
The plot turns are artful but I found myself wondering why I should care at all. The Watermans are irretrievably shallow.
The University of Texas at Austin with its ambitious program for drama and playwriting is fortunate to have hired the prolific Steven Dietz away from Seattle. On the evidence of the four Dietz plays staged here over the last couple of years, he possesses a sure sense of craft as well as an understanding of the hazy dreams of middle class America. The Zach Theatre chose to feature Dietz himself in its promotional material for …
Review: The Threepenny Opera by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 24, 2011
Most memorable of all in an evening that thrashes and enchants its audience is the near-finale of Schnack's "Call from the Grave," as Mack stands with the noose about his neck, contemptuous and berating, with the chilling refrain, "If you forgive me, I will forgive you."
UT's The Threepenny Opera was an astonishing production, of such quality and depth that it deserved to run for months. But the Oscar Brockett Theatre seats only about 200 and there were only seven performances. I organized a group of 16 to attend the first Saturday performance, and they walked away bedazzled. You can pity that one prospective group member who decided not to take up the offer because, he said, he's "allergic to opera." …
Review: Henry V by Velvet Rut Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2011
I like to think that Shakespeare as a hard-working actor and playwright would be entirely at home with the Austin Drama Club. He might object to abridgements of his text and he would be intrigued by the speakeasy atmosphere. But he would see actors and audiences breathing life into his pages.
Punk rock and garage bands give way in Austin, Texas, to speakeasy Shakespeare. The Austin Drama Club was chased by the City from its rental house on East 7th Street, set up out in the brushwood hills last summer with the scorpions, tried doing Julius Caesar at a biker bar in south Austin, and now appears to have found shelter in a ramshackle former supermarket at William Cannon and Westgate. The Community Renaissance Market is …