Recent Reviews
Review: Leela's Wheel by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2009
Gemma is so good at shifting characters that she can give us a middle-aged woman seducing her crofter husband and make us believe in both partners at the same time.
Gemma Wilcox is a lively and inventive woman with a serious case of multiple comic personalities. Her two-act show Leela's Wheel runs about an hour and you never know who (or what) she's going to be next.This piece is dialogue-based, almost never in monologue style. One accepts fairly quickly her theatre convention of transferring instantly from one character to another by shift of position, body English, voice and accent. The impression is a bit like quick-cutting in …
Review: A Matter of Taste by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 30, 2009
There's a core here of irreverent, smart alecky writing that delivers a good time on stage. The sketch format doesn't allow much character exposition, so we're provided jagged humor tied to the incongruities of the imagined situations.
Playwright Bastion Carboni has some good ideas but he gets in their way. There are five ingenious skits in this Long Fringe entertainment but he has the mistaken impression that an audience will be as interested in the creative process as he is.Carboni has actress Jenny Keto preface the evening with a confused, swaggering but finally non-helpful appearance as "the playwright." And at the end of a pretty enertaining evening he brings on the director(?) and …
Review: Dancing at Lughnasa by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 29, 2009
This is the melancholy, nostalgic side of the Irish -- not the wake, but the dirge.
Ah, sweet Jesu, the Irish! A gifted lot, you know, close to the earth; fine women and, o' course, those charmin' but useless men of theirs. Think back with me, now, to the early days, and by that I mean, say, 1936, when the Mundy sisters had just gotten their radio, which back then they called a "Marconi. . . "An ensemble piece for five women actors, Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasagives us an Ireland that …
Review: The BIrd and the Bee by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 27, 2009
Candlelight vigils, a dedicated website, Hannah's efforts to scoop some of that admiration and kumbaya feeling for herself . . . the focus is not on the dead boy but on his acquaintances' exploitation of his death.
Two worlds converge to dark uncertainty. These linked plays are completely different in style but taken together, they resonate and provide tremendous opportunity for gifted actors.Matt Hartley wrote The Bee with a satirical pen as broad as a paintbrush. High school sweetie Chloé (Tayler Gill, left, below) is devastated when her older brother Luke dies in a traffic accident. His dramatic end provides a point of excitement and assembly for the rest of his high school class, …
Review: Kill Will by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2009
The finale? Think Jacobean revenge tragedy. I counted five corpses onstage at the last scene with two more characters rapidly approaching extinction. The company plays it all with sufficient seriousness for us to go along.
There's no Shakespeare in it, but it's certainly full of sound and fury. Signifying. . . .?Think of a crime caper that takes place in the sleazy east London, with a dose of pulp detective attitude, nasty obsession with lowlife violence, guns and Irish prolixity. Austin Alexander plays the lead in his own creation. Mickey Nichols is a guy in a bad way, roughed up in turn by black-leather gangster William Slate, by American cocaine middleman Sid …
Review: My Bugatti Story by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2009
Ehrmann has a lot of himself invested in this narrative. At times he comes across as confessional or woodenly self-obsessed, perfectly in keeping with the character.
My Bugatti Story is playing at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre as part of the 2009 FronterFest Long Fringe. Writer Paul Ehrmann plays Alexander, the principal character. Though there's a cast of six, the show is essentially a long monologue by Ehrmann, interspersed with illustrative scenes. The near-monologue format is appropriate, for most of the action is taking place in his head, or at least in his fantasies. At the opening, Alexander is found in a …