Recent Reviews
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
Review: The Turn of the Screw by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 03, 2009
Jenny Gravenstein uses her face, especially those luminiscent eyes, her posture, and carefully controlled voice and hands to draw us into the pool of flickering light that is the governess's spirit.
Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw takes you into a dark place. A brief chapter sets the scene. On Christmas Eve in an old house in the countryside a group of bourgeois friends has just listened to a ghost story. Their host, Douglas, offers them another, but they have to wait for a manuscript to be dispatched from his residence in London. That text -- "in old, faded ink, and in the most …