Recent Reviews
Review: The Jungle by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 21, 2009
Central to the story is the rite of slaughter that takes place at center stage, a repeated dance of death. It's a haunting image and an intimidating act of virtuoso puppetry, and it comes again and again throughout this piece.
Connor Hopkins' The Jungle is a deeply serious work using high craft to dramatize the worst days of American industry. Upton Sinclair's 1906 piece, first published in serialization and then as a novel, caused a tremendous stir. He tells the story of an penniless immigrant family, crushed by corrupt exploitation, indifference, and unsanitary conditions of the Chicago meat packing industry. Sinclair's ambition had been to shake the American public into awareness of the inhumanity to …
Review: I've Never Been So Happy by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 19, 2009
The story of I've Never Been So Happy is simple and silly enough to qualify as mythic, an affectionate tweaking of the tales and characters familar in tales of Western settlement. The Lynn-Stopschinski partnership is a happy one.
It's clever. It's mythic. It's melodic. It's multimedia.It's the Rude Mechanicals still-in-workshop production of I've Never Been So Happy with book and lyrics by Kirk Lynn and music by Peter Stopchinsky, who also sings the part of the mountain lion.But it's short and it's incomplete. By design, it will leave you wanting more. The Rude Mechanicals have made for themselves an enviable place in the bubbling world of Austin's young non-Equity original-works theatres. The Rudes …
Review: Measure for Measure by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 15, 2009
The opening is a quick glimpse into a late night dive, with hectic ragtime music accompanying jazz babies and half-clad clients dancing in colored spotlights. That wordless surging tableau clears away and we find the Duke, Savannah's ruler, with cardboard suitcase packed.
Austin Shakespeare's Measure for Measure can offer you a good time. It has a dramatic intrigue, lots of clowning, a clever time-warp setting in Savannah, Georgia of the 1920s and a cast that I'd be happy to put up against any other American Shakespeare company out there.At the same time that he's entertaining us, Shakespeare is working some much deeper themes. These include the responsibility of authority; chastity, promiscuity, desire and disease; the role of …
Review: The Dragonfly Queen by Ethos
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 10, 2009
But you have to tell a story. Not just string together events. We simple human creatures have been looking for meaning since we crawled out of the trees.
The Vortex production of The Dragonfly Queen is a triumph for costume designer Lauren Matesic and for makeup & hair designer Helen Hutka, who also appears onstage.This is a manga world of eerie creatures locked in mortal combat. The program gives the background about the quest of Princess Mala. It includes a summary of the 2007 Vortex/Ethos production of The Dragonfly Princess, an outline of the 11 years elapsed since then in story time, and …
Review: You Can't Do That, Dan Moody! by The Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 08, 2009
You Can't Do That, Dan Moody is not the sort of happily fictionalized singing and dancing spectacle that is regularly offered at tourist destinations. It's not slick and sometimes the text is leaden, but it is, ultimately, gripping. It's a participatory piece for Georgetowners, both those in the p
You Can't Do That, Dan Moody! offers spectators some cracking drama, particularly in the second half, with riveting re-enactments of brutality by the Ku Klux Klan and of the 1923 trial at the Georgetown courthouse in which district prosecutor Dan Moody became the first in the nation to convince a jury to convict and jail Klansmen.But in intention and form this production is directly in line with the epic origins of theatre. An epic, taken …
Review: No One Else Will Ever Love You by Katherine Craft & Dan Solomon
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 08, 2009
No One Else Will Ever Love You is about coupling. Not about copulation, though the back story certainly featured that somewhere, but principally about the risks and dependencies as members of a couple negotiate their relationships with one another and with other individuals.
Offering a play in someone's house or apartment breaks down some of the conventions of theatre. There's more of a sense of risk for all concerned -- players, audience and host.In most theatrical events the audience is anonymous, a collection of shapes outside the brightly lit playing space. And most of them like it that way. The front row never fills up first. Maybe there's a latent worry about sitting within grasp of the actors. …