Recent Reviews
Review: A Number by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 27, 2009
Churchill's texts are plosive monologues. Ideas and questions rush out out father and son, as each only half-listens to the other.
The concept of human cloning is profoundly unsettling.We like the fact each of us is unique. Individuality situates us in the universe and in our own skins. Each of us might fantasize a different reality or our self as a different individual, but we intuit that even those avatars, if realized, would be unique.The existence of fraternal twins or triplets is nature's benevolent random trick that reinforces our faith in our own individuality. Nature has …
Review: Buried Child by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 25, 2009
While creating these grotesques this cast and director show acute awareness of pacing, visible thought and reaction.They create whole characters and visible emotion, maintaining audience engagement in what otherwise might seem so incredible and farcical as to provoke laughter.
Sam Shephard's Buried Child gives such a strange, phantasmagoric world that one's first impulse might be to play it for laughs. In Shephard's introduction to the printed edition he speaks of revising the text for the 1995 Steppenwolf theatre company in Chicago and of director Gary Sinese's "instinct to push the characters and situation in an almost burlesque territory, which suddenly seemed right." At Southwestern University, director Jared J. Stein and his exemplary young ensemble of players create Shephard's …
Review: Leading Ladies by The Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 24, 2009
Many shenanigans, an engagement party with some impressively comic tango-dancing, changes of character and costume, and the deceiver deceiv'd -- Ken Ludwig is no Shakespeare, but we don't need high culture to have a good time with this script.
Leading Ladies by Ken Ludwig has all the big-footed clowning of a British pantomime, that venerable, wheezy holiday art form in which the British public hoots and chortles at manly men dressing up as women. Dame Edna is the royalty of that genre, but every middle- and lower-class family wants to attend the local "panto" in December, and British TV comedy sketches will inevitably get around to putting a male comedian into something frilly, and preferably …
Review: Let Me Down Easy by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 21, 2009
Her performance is a portrait album, recreating for us conversations or interviews with individuals as widely different as super model Lauren Hutton and a 16-year-old girl in small town Texas struck with cancer.
We go to the theatre to be delighted or to be moved.On rare occasions we are both delighted and moved. And on even rarer occasions, an artist of exceptional intelligence and ability delights, moves and educates us. This evening with Anna Deavere Smith, intimate and often amusing, reaches deep into the common humanity of Americans.Her performance is a portrait album, recreating for us conversations or interviews with individuals as widely different as super model Lauren Hutton and …
Review: The Pajama Game by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 20, 2009
Despite the predictable story line and the cardboard-cutout characters, we embrace the star power of this cast. There's plenty of toe-tapping and foolery, and the leads are bursting with talent.
Michael McKelvey and that talented cast at St. Ed's send us whizzing in a happy time machine back to 1954, when the American musical was in its full, ripe heyday. That was the age of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Dilemma Is Resolved and All Live Happily Ever After. Into that sure-fire mix the producers stirred a crowd of Supporting Hoofers, an Eccentric or two and an Almost Villain; they seasoned it with a …
Review: The Method Gun by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 19, 2009
The art of acting in live theatre is dangerous and alluring, especially in a society that turns less and less frequently to the celebration of that collective and colloborate art. To venture onstage is to take a great risk. As in Russian Roulette.
So what, exactly, is the Method Gun?The short, obvious and wrong answer is that it's the loaded pistol that is secured in a birdcage by a troupe of intense, troubled actors. And like any loaded pistol that features in stage action, it will, eventually be used (cf., "the loaded gun theory").That piece of hardware is a gun, but it's not The Method Gun except in a very minor, representational way.The ensemble makes us at home for the show, …