Recent Reviews
Review: Miss Witherspoon by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 12, 2009
Underwood herself is worth well more than the price of admission, and at times the piece becomes a one-woman show. Hovering in that unexpected afterlife, she longs for release, rest and forgetfulness.
Jennifer Underwood is larger than life. Like famous stage personalities, she captures our attention utterly with her remarkable appearance, conviction and an acting talent that amounts almost to shape-changing. In Miss Witherspoon, directed by Karen M. Jambon for Different Stages and now playing at the City Theatre, Underwood is a deeply disappointed soul in the afterlife, determined not to give in to the requirement that she be reincarnated. Sometimes, with her stubborn will, she prevails; …
Review: The World's Fastest Hamlet by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 04, 2009
Once they’d finished, to cheers from the audience, our players over-topped themselves by doing a two-minute Hamlet, followed by a ten-second Hamlet.
Sometimes you master the venue and other times the venue masters you. We went to downtown Austin on the afternoon of the First Night celebrations, particularly to check out the theatre events. The World's Fastest Hamlet by Austin Shakespeare and Heron & Crane by the DA! Theatre Collective were advertised for the HBMG Foundation stage in the park just under the south end of the First Street Bridge. Except that there was no stage there. …
Review: Heron and Crane by DA! Theatre Collective
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 04, 2009
Anyone with an ounce of wonder left in his or her spirit would be pleased to make the acquaintance of such engaging characters as these.
New Year's Eve day, 2008. The sun had gone lower in the sky, sending broad yellow shafts of light across dusty Zilker Park under the First Street bridge. When we came back in half an hour to the HBMG venue, the DA! Theatre Collective was setting up for their touring children’s show, Heron & Crane. At the 4:30 showtime there was almost no audience. The DA! players had set up on the road. Almost without …
Review: The Last Five Years (2009) by Penfold Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 04, 2009
As this very handsome pair of actors work the story from both ends, we begin to realize that Brown and director Michael McKelvey are carefully dosing our emotions. Everyone loves someone who is in love.
Intimate but lonely, a haunted portrait of a relationship with the musical flair and lash of cabaret – The Last Five Years, produced by Penfold Theatre and now playing at the Larry L. King Theatre of Austin Playhouse, is a memorable evening spent with two talented characters in the most promising years of their lives. No one wants to watch the failure of a marriage, to hover as witnesses as hope, delight and enthusiasm go …
Review: Christmas Belles by multiple (Sam Bass, Wimberley Players, City Theatre)
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 18, 2008
There you are – three successful productions, shaped by director and cast for specific audiences, very similar and yet in some ways very different.
The goofy holiday comedy Christmas Belles has closed at the Sam Bass Theatre in Round Rock and at the Wimberly Players, but you can still catch it through this weekend at the City Theatre in Austin, one of my favorite venues in town. Three local versions? Four, in fact, if you’re willing to extend your area of coverage to San Antonio, where the show closed this past weekend at the Harlequin Dinner Theatre. I reviewed …
Review: Abuelita's Christmas Carol by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 15, 2008
Doña Rosita is a nutty, distracted, exuberant woman who hosts a televised cooking show in which she rambles along with remarks about her life and family and rarely gets around actually to demonstrating the promised cooking techniques or recipes.
UPDATE: Alex Garza brings Abuelita back to the City Theatre, December 20-22, 2010 Alex Garza’s photo for this funny, charming tribute might suggest to you a cross-dressing version of elfin Espy Randolph in Zach Theatre’s annual Santaland Diaries. Not so. For Abuelita's Christmas Carol Alex does use a prop or two, including those wonderful fly-away glasses and a Christmas apron, but for almost all of the presentation he dresses as himself.He's a bald-shaven, short, rounded …