Recent Reviews
Review: Luchadora by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 20, 2023
LUCHADORA is a charming and useful fable, a tale about growing up cross-cultural and embracing the heroic. Compliments to Becca Jimenez, who played the protagonist Vanessa on opening night,.
Parents have their secrets, even responsible and affectionate parents, and children don't often discover them. Especially not when the offspring is still a child; single children—those without siblings—probably even less often. But there's a magic at work as one approaches adulthood and develops into a person uncannily like one or the other parent. Or both. "Coming of age" and "quest" stories have always resounded, whether told beside a campfire, in a novel or movie, …
Review: The Dragonfly Princess by Vortex Repertory Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on April 20, 2023
Take advantage of the Vortex/Ethos cyber operas when you can; someday they may become as rare as the fairies at the bottom of your garden.
“There are fairies at the bottom of our garden…” the song goes. But they are no fairies such as these I’ll warrant. Fairy mythology and the land of faery have taken many turns in literature and the arts, their baby-stealing propensities amplified in Changelings, produced at Salvage Vanguard Theatre several years back. But in the dark, gothic imagination of Chad Salvata the fairies have become more contradictory, at once monstrous, magical, loving, quarreling, self-serving, …
Review: SMORG by Emily Rushing, Carissa Topham
by David Glen Robinson
Published on April 16, 2023
A very auspicious beginning for the new company of Emily Rushing and Carissa Topham. SMORG has a bright future.
SMORG is the name of Austin’s newest dance company. Its co-artistic directors are Carissa Topham and Emily Rushing. SMORG An Evening of Dance, their premiere outing, played through the intimate space of Café Dance on Hancock Drive in west Austin. The superior group performance by many of Austin’s top rank performers created a very auspicious beginning for a new company with a very bright future. A few notes can be offered on the pieces, …
Review: ROE by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 14, 2023
ROE is cracking good drama although subtly slanted to views shared by most Austinites. Director Jenny Lavery and her team deliver the nourishment so badly needed after the retrograde Dobbs decision and in the face of spreading authoritarianism,
Four syllables, emblematic of the hard-won right of women to bodily autonomy accorded 7-2 by the Supreme Court fifty years ago. Playwright Lisa Loomer pries the cap off that four-syllable can of worms and portrays individuals involved in and invested in that 1973 result—above all, the titular "Jane Roe." Norma McCorvey was pregnant for a third time and simply wanted not to be pregnant. Recent UT Law School graduate (one of only forty women …
Review: BIG LOVE by Charles Mee, Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 10, 2023
BIG LOVE, Charles Mee's riff on the earliest extant Greek drama, under Allison Price's direction was vibrant with the hormones, clashing views, and intensity of our own era's war between men and women—a notable achievement.
What goes around, comes around. Not only in the sense of retribution, but also as recycling and renewal. I reviewed a production of Charles Mee's Big Love when CTXLT was but a blog. Turns out that Caleb Straus's 2009 staging was at Texas State University. And now, thirteen and a half years later, director Allison Price has renewed the work at the same university—in the same locale, but in a theatre turned inside-out …
Review: Follies by Entr'acte at Parker Jazz Club, March 5, 2023
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 07, 2023
Follies was a reviewer's torment -- too much treasure, no time to signal it. Enormous talent compressed into the small space of the Parker Jazz Club was almost to much to take.
Sarah and Adam, how could you torment a theatre reviewer so? The Sunday afternoon performance of Sondheim's dense, evocative 1971 musical Follies at the atmospheric Parker Jazz Club was the first of only two, performed on a single day. What use, then, is a review, except as an expression of regret that more theatre lovers did not get to witness it? Wikipedia asserts that Follies was the first work for which Sondheim insisted on writing both …