Recent Reviews
Review: The Servant Girl Annihilator by Weird City Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 02, 2010
'Servant Girl Annihilator' evokes grim true history of horror and victimization, and as a technique, the tour on the stage is halfway between conventional theatre and spook house.
For Halloween and for the following weekend your friends at the Weird City Theatre Company take you on a ghost tour. In the program they express special thanks to Monica Ballard and the Austin Ghost Tours for help with research on the late night attacks and rapes of 1884-1885 recalled in the piece. The title is taken from a comment in a letter written by the 23-year-old William Sydney Porter -- O. Henry -- who …
Review: The 39 Steps by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 29, 2010
The theatrical spoof has actions and effects going comically wrong, reminding us that we are spectators, watching real people. Players play actors playing characters, and they'll drop out of character to mug, heave a sigh or remonstrate.
Austin Playhouse scheduled Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps for a run of almost two months, but I didn't manage to use my season tickets until the penultimate weekend of the run. Not that I expected to be disappointed; The 39 Steps won an Olivier award for best comedy in 2007 and the Broadway version, with the added tag tying it to Hitchcock, ran for two years before moving off-Broadway. And not too far off Broadway …
Review: Hamlet (at Boggy Creek Cemetary) by Black Swan Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 28, 2010
You have to earn your trip to Shakespeare's imagined world by mentally surpressing the insistent, incessant sounds of Texas on the go. These players make that possible, always.
Justin Scalise as Hamlet is intent and impressive. AustinLiveTheatre had that to say and more in the September 25 ALT review of essentially this same production as presented downtown at the Scottish Rite Theatre -- in all too short a run and with a curtailed final week. This staging is by Black Swan Events. The swan is new hatched and because of the surprisingly poorly attendance at the Scottish Rite staging, it's new fledged, as …
Review: Siyavash by Philip Kreyche, Wit's End Theatre Project
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2010
Playwright-manager-director-actor Kreyche fashioned a script in vigorous blank verse and took the central role of Siyâvash. Combining all those responsibilities for a staging is rare these days and somewhat risky, but the declamatory form provided a reassuring framework.
That Philip Kreyche is a dab hand at theatre, a young man with imagination and a taste for the exotic. His earlier piece Love Me was an expressionist treatment of incidents in the life of the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. He staged it first at a summer workshop at Austin Community College and then brought it back for FronteraFest. I hadn't heard of Kokoschka. Kreyche's piece prompted me to do some research -- which …
Review: Mad Forest by Red Dragon Players, Austin High School
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 19, 2010
Pacing is sublime, suggesting a hesitancy, an overcoming and then a willingness to reveal these desires both to themselves and to one another. The act gathers speed and intensity in a crowded family scene including the shocking spectacle of a gleeful re-enactment of the execution of the Ceaucescus
Theatre is a lens. The audience and the players look through the action in the playing space to perceive a story in the collective imagination. That story may be entertaining, or trivial, or profound, and the clarity of the vision is directly affected by the skill of the players and the willingness of the audience to engage. The themes may be familiar. Take vampires, for instance. The century-old thrills of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel got …
Review: Mauritius by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 18, 2010
ACC's Mauritius stays firmly on the rails, with more than one sudden twist. Director Shelby Brammer keeps her cast at speed and they deliver that satisfying dénouement. There's a reason that the form of the well-made play has lasted so long.
Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius is in many aspects a well-made play, fitting neatly into the 19th- and early-20th century tradition in the United Kingdom and in France (there, as une pièce bien faite). Cribbing quickly from Wikipedia, that Cliff's Notes of the Internet, one gets the reminder that the well-made play has a strong neoclassical flavour, involving a very tight plot and a climax that takes place very close to the end of the story, with …