Recent Reviews
Review: Long Day's Journey into Night by Ar Rude
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 31, 2009
To attend this production and to watch this cast at work in the carefully tatty Victorian set designed by Scott Guthrie is to enter deep in the troubled psyche of one of America's most successful and most haunted writers.
Eugene O'Neill did not want you to see this astonishing, bleak and deeply moving drama. When he died in a Boston hotel room in 1953, he had left it locked up in the vaults of his publisher Random House with instructions that it was not to be opened for 25 years after his death, and that it was never to be performed. Instead, his third wife Carlotta Monterrey, who had fought with him and protected him …
Review: The Fantasticks by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 29, 2009
The pretend nostalgia of this show plays well with old duffers like me, and the charm still inherent to the script plays well with spectators such as my 24-year-old daughter.
The Fantasticks at Austin Playhouse is charming. This reliable, charming low-budget winsome musical has been charming 'em since its low-budget opening off-Broadway in 1960.This is the show that smashed the records for long runs -- with a 42-year run by the original production and 17,162 performances. Then a New York City revival that ran 655 performances in 2006-2008 at the Snapple Theatre Center's Jerry Orbach Theatre on 50th Street, paused, then resumed and is still going. You can check out …
Review: Boom Town by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 27, 2009
All three of these characters are at the ends of their ropes. In the course of the two acts we spend with them, we begin to realize just how far each of them has to fall.
Compression facilitates explosion.This is a relatively simple application of basic physics. External pressure applied to a volatile gas speeds combustion, renders it violent and maximizes heat. That's one of the principles that runs your automobile with its internal combusion engine.Director/designer David Schneider at the Gaslight Baker Theatre in Lockhart applies the principle to Jeff Daniels' sardonically titled "Boom Town."Schneider shrinks the focus within the wide proscenium by masking the wings with black curtains, and sharply …
Review: Hay Fever by North by Northwest Production Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 25, 2009
All those Blisses have a fine time trying to enlist their visitors in a post-dinner parlor game similar to charades, but their real joy is that of making theatre in real life.
Bernadette Nason sparkles like pink champagne in this amusing, silly piece written by "the master" Noël Coward when he was a mere boy of 25. Hay Fever lightly chronicles the start of a weekend at a country house near London, property of the Bliss family -- David is a novelist, Judith is an actress who recently said her adieux to the London stage and their children Simon and Sorel have no identifiable professions or preoccupations. They all have artistic …
Review: The Long Now by Shrewd Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 24, 2009
Beth Burns the playwright lays out for us the tangle of memory, emotion and opportunity, while Burns the director manipulates our perceptions and turns inside-out our understanding of the situation.
Beth Burns' The Long Now opens with the charmingly simple concept stressed in its marketing: Tish Reilly has a very special friend – Time. Tish can go back to any place where a good memory remains and enter it, reliving the moments that please her. We meet the winsome Tish, played by Shannon Grounds, at her dead end job of alphabetizing and filing folders beginning with the letter "F." Maybe this is an insurance company; maybe it's another bureaucracy.Her …
Review: Sordid Lives by Sam Bass Community Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 20, 2009
This is a revenge play. Shores acknowledges that he grew up in the mercilessly parodied town of Winters.
Round Rock's Sam Bass Community Theatre isn't a formal repertory company. It's a circle of players, techs and supporters who gather for six or seven productions a year in the plain playing space that was formerly a Union Pacific depot. As you follow the Sam Bass season, you have the pleasure of seeing familiar faces reappear in new guises and disguises. They're friendly folk; the cast always gathers outside the theatre to greet their departing …