Recent Reviews
Review: The Thanksgiving Play by Different Stages at the Vortex, Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 25, 2021
The Thanksgiving Play, a waggish four-actor satire, had the opening night audience roaring with laughter and delight. Director Melissa Vogt and the quartet of fresh faces of this cast make it easy to enjoy both the holiday and this gentle comedy.
Happy conjunctions: -- For this 2021 Thanksgiving season Norman Blumensaat's Different Stages company elected to stage Larissa Fasthorse's The Thanksgiving Play, a waggish four-actor satire that had the opening night audience roaring with laughter and delight throughout its uninterrupted presentation. -- Second, the production is the normally busy Different Stages' return to live performance after the terrible COVID interruption, prepared with careful precautions for a thoroughly vaccinated and masked audience. -- And this …
Review: The Marriage of Figaro by Austin Opera
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 09, 2021
What a way to end the famine of Austin performance! Taking in Austin Opera's striking production of the Mozart's comic opera was the equivalent of consuming an entire wedding cake over the course of a lengthy evening.
What a way to end the famine of Austin performance! Taking in Austin Opera's striking production of the Mozart's comic opera was the equivalent of consuming an entire wedding cake over the course of a lengthy evening. The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is by common consensus one of the best and by performance history one of the most popular works of operatic staging, so the audience in Dell Hall, Long Center, Austin had every right …
Review: Bollywood Twelfth Night by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 08, 2021
This Ilyria of the imagination transforms with little strain into a Hindi setting. Aaron Kubacak's costumes and Evonne Paik Griffin's scenic design amplify the antics of a fine cast.
Artistic director of Austin Shakespeare Ann Ciccolella is a dab hand at relocating the settings of Shakespeare's works while preserving the coherence and vigor of the material. This, her second go at producing a Bollywood-influenced interpretation of Twelfth Night, makes me regret that I didn't see the 2012 production, presented free of charge in Zilker Park. Both have benefited from the sly wit of Prakash Mohandas's choreography, but one advantage of this production is evident from …
Review: Hedda Gabler by Broke Thespian's Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 03, 2021
On reflection, it occurred to me that in this bare-bones production the audience was perceiving the imagined world as Hedda Gabler must be seeing it; their viewpoint was from within her disturbed mind.
Ibsen was in the habit of shaking up the bourgeoisie, especially in the latter half of his 40-plus year career as theatre manager and playwright. Hedda Gabler (1891) is in some ways an extension of ideas in his A Doll's House, (1879), which concludes with Nora, a respectable married woman, walking out on her husband and children. In this play the titular Hedda Gabler, daughter of old General Gabler, is initially referred to only as …
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Review: Wonder of the World by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 25, 2021
WONDER OF THE WORLD could have easily been dedicated to women as the wonders of the world. Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire makes every male character hapless, clueless, or inept, while each of the women is wonderfully focused and sure.
David Lindsay-Abaire's farce Wonder of the World echoes the proud claim of promoters of Niagara Falls, which is the desperation destination for the protagonists. They're an odd couple (think of Neil Simon's Oscar Madison and Felix Unger), two women who meet up on a Greyhound bus in route to Niagara. Cass, the exuberant blonde, has a long list of "must do" items accumulated over seven years of deeply humdrum marriage to Kip, her dully earnest, …
Review: Bluegrass Junction by Performa/Dance
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 24, 2021
Joy and Brilliance. This could have been the subtitle of Performa/Dance's BLUEGRASS JUNCTION, brilliantly expressed in ballet-structured dances choreographed by artistic director Jennifer Hart.
Joy and Brilliance. This could have been the subtitle of the show. As it is, Bluegrass Junction, simple and evocative, modestly concealed its joy and brilliance until the audience was in place and saw it for itself. Then the introductory dance with the full ensemble exploded with the handclapping, foot-stomping, live music-playing joy of an Appalachian hoedown. The flying imagery channeled any number of paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, all of it under the open …