Recent Reviews
Review: City of Angels by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 13, 2010
Don't go expecting a straight story line. Chandler's whodunnits, unlike those of the tidy Agatha Christie, are mazes of deception anyway, and once the omniscient writer and the egotistical producer start making competing edits, you'll just lose the intrigue.
You have to be alert in this town to catch St. Edward's stagings at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, off South Congress. They're of professional quality, well directed, well designed and well received. They even feature two or three Equity guest artists per production, whose participation spurs the already gifted St. Ed's students to even higher levels of accomplishment. Their productions flash across the horizon like meteors, though. Two weekends and that's it. …
Review: Keeping Track by Teatro Vivo
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 12, 2010
Saenz keeps the relationships at cordial boil throughout this piece, drawing for us with verisimilitude the tensions, affections and competing rivalries of family and friends in a middle-class assimilated Latino milieu.
Though there's a PacMan motif on curtains, on the stage and on the poster, Erica Saenz's Keeping Track is really a thoughtful family drama rather than a creepy-crawly sci fi piece. Saenz uses as a plot device the supposition that well-meaning caretakers might implant "smart chips" in human beings, as vets already do with pets. In the context of this story, the smart chip is less a threat than a symbol -- of the deep attachment …
Review: Sleeping Beauty, musical by Vortex Repertory Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 11, 2010
Going to Sleeping Beauty at the Vortex is like going to watch Mardi Gras in New Orleans, except that it's a bit more chaste and chaperoned.
The Vortex's Sleeping Beauty is a riot of costumes and color, music and dance. Bonnie Cullum and composer-librettist Content Love Knowles keep that cast of 20 swirling in the vortex around the spiral staircase at stage center, animated by Knowles and three other musicians perched high above stage right. Many of the players play double roles. Costumes by Pam Fletcher Friday and Griffon Ramsey are inventive, playful and brilliantly colored, with the witty use of found fabrics …
Review: Our Town by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 08, 2010
I didn't perceive that inner shift -- the gathering calm of resignation and understanding. As my silver-haired wife commented afteward, "But they're all young. How could they understand that yet?"
Stage Manager: I've married over two hundred couples in my day. . . . M . . . marries N . . . . millions of them. The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday afternoon drives in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will -- Once in a thousand times it's interesting. [He now looks at the audience for the first time, with a warm smile …
Review: How The Other Half Loves by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 08, 2010
We get to watch the two dinner parties develop in the same space in alternate time-stop action. The result is a devilishly clever bit of plotting and some sparkling comedy.
Alan Ayckbourn applies a clever staging twist of time and space in the first act of this contemporary English comedy of manners, and it is a delight to watch the City players accomplish it. How The Other Half Loves, as the title implies, is a satire of class and sexual mores. I repeatedly mistyped that title in the ALT "images" feature for the production, because my fingers were finding their way back to How The …
Review: Harvey by The Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 05, 2010
The Palace gives this old stuff a vigorous production, including its signature attention to sets and detail. Michael Rhea comfortably nudges Jimmy Stewart out of our minds with his interpretation of Elwood P. Dowd.
If it weren't for Jimmy Stewart, Mary Chase's gentle comedy Harveywould probably have been forgotten long ago. It's a pretty broad farce about a hysterically pretentious small town woman desperate to avoid the social opprobrium of her unmarried brother's mental delusions. The local mental clinic Chumley's Rest is one locus of the fun, where blinkered psychiatrists and a muscle-guy attendant think Veta Louise is the nut-case. Brother Elwood P. Dowd serenely accepts their diagnoses …