Recent Reviews
Review: Leave It to Beverly by DA! Theatre Collective
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 11, 2009
Eventually the girls discover great big tins resembling 2-gallon Campbell's soup containers, labeled "HA.HA.HA." Within them is a gelatinous colored substance that has got to be the canned laughter that permeates their existence.
Kirk German's Leave It to Beverly is a rib-tickler. His characters and cast go sailing off into TV Land of the 1950s and 1960s, taking the gags and the mannerisms way up over the top. DA! applies its energetic young 21st-century humor to Mom and Pop's naive entertainments and comes away a winner. Consider, for example, canned laughter. The early days of television featured many programs filmed before live audiences, but with rising costs and the introduction …
Review: Wait Until Dark by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 09, 2009
Even if you know the famous 1967 Audrey Hepburn/Alan Arkin film version of the acclaimed Broadway play, you are going to find yourself engaged in this meticulously plotted story.
Harry Roat is a really, really mean guy. In this Gaslight Baker Theatre production of Wait Until Dark, David Young plays Roat with alarming, menacing stillness as he snares two minor ex-cons into the hunt for a lost shipment of heroin, setting them up as potential fall guys for a murder that Roat himself has just committed. Yes, this is the one about Suzy, the blind woman that the bad guys are trying to confuse and …
Review: The Cherry Orchard by Breaking String Theater
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 06, 2009
Director Graham Schmidt has made canny matches between Chekhov's vivid characters and the Austin acting talent happily available to him.
What is this quiet exhilaration I feel in the presence of Chekhov? Especially when the piece is as well played as this one?For opening night at the Blue Theatre many of the seats were taken by young persons who might well have been undergraduates. Directly opposite me, across the three-quarter thrust of the playing space, one or two had spiral notebooks and pencils in hand. I cannot recall if the vision of this end-of-the-19th-century Russian physician …
Review: What Was I Thinking?? by Michelle Rundgren
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 05, 2009
The girlfriends were laughing rather than crying, though behind the hilarity was the feeling that the clock was ticking and eligible men were getting harder and harder to find. Isn't the best comedy often based on apprehension?
What Was I Thinking? is Michele Rundgren’s clever transformation of a book of women's tales of woe into a tipsy party of girlfriends who can laugh – now – at the world’s worst boyfriends and the world’s worst dates. The show ran for two weekends at the Hyde Park Theatre, and its sassy attitude brightened up that often foreboding space. I got there only at the closing show, on Halloween, which ran from 4 p.m. to …
Review: Under the Gaslight by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 04, 2009
Ever wonder about the melodrama scene where the dastardly villain ties his victim to the railroad tracks?Iit didn't originate with Snidley Whiplash and Dudley Dooright, though that may be where you first saw it.
Ever wonder about the melodrama scene where the dastardly villain ties his victim to the railroad tracks? No, it didn't originate with Snidley Whiplash and Dudley Dooright, though that may be where you first saw it. Jay Ward was copying it out of a long tradition of silent movie serials that drew on saloon theatricals. Credit for the notion goes to New York theatre empresario Augustin Daly, in his 1867 production of this play, Under The …
Review: The Trojan Women by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 03, 2009
When Verity Branco comes on as Helen of Troy, my God, we have got Jessica Rabbit in the flesh -- slinky black dress split to the hip, high heels, and scarlet elbow-length gloves.
I have puzzled and puzzled about this production. Meghan Kennedy and Kimber Lee preserve the approximate shape of Euripides' great tragedy. Their text rarely echoes his lines directly, but it includes scenes of sharp, cadenced prose or blank verse that evoke the terror and hopelessness of brutally widowed women left in tattered clothing, dirt and desperation. In particular, Kate DeBuys as Hecuba is magnificent. She projects a stunned concentration in which only the steel of her …