Recent Reviews
Review: A Sherlock Holmes Christmas by The Archive Theater Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 21, 2022
The venue is comfortable, the story's satisfying, the cast and staff are friendly, and the Christmas cheer comes happily sneaking up even on the occasional Grinch. Afterward, I was ready to face the holiday season!
Not to bah, humbug! about it, but December is a difficult month for theatre reviewers. And December—okay, the Christmas season—starts in mid-November. With a sigh, I tot it up once again this year: stages across the CTXLT region are putting up thirty-eight holiday plays this holiday season. THIRTY-EIGHT! Including eight versions of A Christmas Carol. EIGHT! Oh, for some variation! A cracking good mystery, for example. Though preferably not Ken Ludwig's The Game's Afoot, or Holmes for the Holidays, opening …
Review: A Short Stop at the Long Time by BLiPSWiTCH
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 21, 2022
Weather and a power failure posed no obstacles to BlipSwitch's creative dance interpretations of Frank Curry's gray-scale images of humans as insects. Blipswitch is nimble, and its doughty fans scramble to keep up.
Pivot. Adapt. Repeat. These might be the watchwords of Blipswitch Movement's latest success A Short Stop at The Long Time, a highly successful performance on November 19, 2022. The show offered a multimedia show in the truest sense. The event was a fine arts dance performance wrapped around a photography exhibit, performed to an electronic soundtrack composed for the event. Afterward, the up-and-coming synth band Grand Maximum, performed live to all hours. The final …
Review: These Shining Lives by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2022
Director Lara Toner and the Mary Moody Northen Theatre deliver a sincere, open-hearted performance of a script that concentrates exclusively upon harm caused initially by ignorance and subsequently by willful ignorance.
At the heart of These Shining Lives are the remarkable matched performances of Sonia Mariah Fonseca and Christina Hollie as young industrial workers painting luminiscent numbers onto clockfaces at the Radium Dial Company in the 1920's and 1930's. Lara Toner's choice in casting and directing them was perceptive. Her direction brings them gradually together, a melding of opposites. Fonseca—petite, initially timid, and vulnerable—is Catherine, the lead, with a heartbreaking story arc. A young …
Review #2 of 2: CHICAGO by touring company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on November 13, 2022
The touring production doesn't attempt to redefine CHICAGO; it does an amazing job of capturing the original spirit of the show: a celebration of life while on death row. A very welcome message at this time.
All the songs are fever dreams of the incarcerated. The set is an homage to the Duke Ellington Band’s scaffolded-style stage. The spotlights dance about like police search lights. The dancing is joyous, raw, animalistic—pure visceral sensuality and unbridled passion. If “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” then the choreography speaks in sublime sentences that form poetic paragraphs . The music slinks like Eliot’s scampering marmoset. The show elevates the timeless romanticism …
Review: The Barber of Seville by Austin Opera
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 08, 2022
Austin Opera's staging of THE BARBER OF SEVILLE is thoroughly entertaining. You could even turn off the sound and have a good time (but don't do that—you'll miss some of today's most dazzling vocal performers!).
Rossini's The Barber of Seville is—and except for its 1816 opening night, always has been—great fun. Classic comic types are here, familiar from a tradition stretching to the present from early Roman comedies and the commedia dell'arte: a yearning ingénue (the soprano) about to be married off to an unsuitable suitor (a bass); the clever, handsome young man courting her in disguise (a tenor) with the help of a comic trickster (a baritone). Librettist Cesare …
Review #1 of 2: CHICAGO by 2022 touring company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 03, 2022
Chicago's message: Life is a vaudeville, old chum. Come to the vaudeville!
Why should one bother to see yet another production of Chicago? The musical debuted nearly fifty years ago, in 1975; the film came out in 2002; and the work long ago proliferated among regional, community, educational, and even kiddie theatre companies. CTXLiveTheatre records ten productions of Chicago across the region, including a 2013 national tour, versions by Austin Playhouse, the Georgetown Palace, San Antonio's NESA high school arts program, and even a 2016 staging by …