Recent Reviews
Review: She Stoops to Conquer by The Classic Theatre of San Antonio
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 28, 2009
Ross and his cast set a fine rhythm to this, assisted by wry asides to the audience and the comic convention of having props proffered promptly over the screen at rear by an unseen hand.
She Stoops to Conquer, approaching its last weekend in San Antonio, is elegant, witty, and stylish. Director Allan S. Ross recreates the conventions of the 18th century English theatre, including the use of a nearly bare stage, a painted partition at the rear, and the actors' respectful but self confident acknowledgment of the ladies and gentlemen of the public.Goldsmith's work is a clever comedy of manners in which the men are all self-important bumblers of …
Review: Nosferatu by Weird City Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 27, 2009
The silhouetted figure of the lurking Count Orlach and shadow projections were highly effective, and the creepiest moment of all was his red-tinged emergence from that boxy coffin dominating center stage.
If you're looking for dark and spooky, then Weird City Theatre Company has got dark and spooky for you, down at the Dougherty Arts Center for the Thursday to Sunday Halloween weekend. These connoisseurs of the unnerving have blended Bram Stoker's Dracula and F.W. Murnau's unauthorized German expressionist film knock-off of the novel for a short, satisfying evening of the eerie. You could view the 84-minute video of Murnau's 1922 silent film as preserved by …
Review: Hamlet by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2009
City Theatre's Hamlet will carry you along its boisterous flow. Aaron Black is energetic and assertive, if not always very likeable. Destiny arrives at a gallop.
Director Jeff Hinkle and the City Theatre cast led by Aaron Black as Hamlet give us a gripping up-tempo version of the famous events in Elsinore. Elapsed playing time from the first challenge on the battlements to Hamlet's dying gasp, "The rest -- is silence" is just a little more than two and a half hours. That fits the play well within the max bounds for today's young movie-going public and gives them the bonus …
Review: Murder Ballad Murder Mystery by Tutto Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2009
The clowning was lots of Keystone Kops sort of stuff and some decadent red-neck carrying on. Most of the time the obviously talented musicians were mangling the tunes just the way that the whooping and hollering actors were mangling the stories.
Murder Ballad Murder Mystery is imagined and delivered as a clown show balanced precariously on deep and true traditional ballads. Those ballads are deep, because stories of passion, violence and murder are rooted somewhere pretty close to our shared DNA. True, because they contain archetypes of our culture: the restless husband; the innocent and defenseless girl-child; the rapscallion, the rapist, and the rowdy. Including, of course, musicians and theatre folk. Playwright Elizabeth Doss, who appears …
Review: In.Car.Nation by Electronic Planet Ensemble
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 15, 2009
Behind David Jewell and Sergio Samayoa is the screen that flickers with video, kaleidoscopic images and transforming stills, a non-linear dream of transportation as power, elegance, and adventure.
Classic cars of the 1950s float in the collective consciousness of Americans, but as David Jewell gently admonishes us, they'll soon be gone, as distant and vanished as the dinosaurs that enchant our children today. Jewell is the solo narrator, actor and verbal imager for In.Car.Nation, while Sergio R. Samayoa provides the live soundtrack with computer-synthesizer and guitar. Jewell gives different first-person voices for his unnamed spoken characters, different rhythms, with a keen but deadpan …
Review: Joan of Arc: The Night Before by Ad Astera
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 15, 2009
'Joan of Arc, The Night Before. . . . ' has the naked force of psycho-drama, a quality that is both its strength and its weak point.
Imprisoned by the English, unransomed by Charles VII although he owed his coronation to her, the 19-year-old Jeanne d'Arc was convicted of heresy by an ecclesiastical court and burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431. From the age of 12, this illiterate girl from a peasant family had had visions of saints urging the expulsion of the English armies from France. Through force of personality she managed to reach the court of the despairing …