Recent Reviews
Review: Neva by Theatre en Bloc
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 20, 2017
Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderon provides a fairly rich multi-level text for this tragicomedy of failed revolution, and it's a performance vehicle for Liz Beckham. Dialogues carry all of the show.
NEVA by Guillermo Calderon is the imagining of life after Chekhov for his widow Olga Knipper, played by Liz Beckham. Knipper was an actress in the Moscow Art Theatre. Her opening monologue sets her in a rehearsal studio in St. Petersburg in 1905, six months after Chekhov’s death. She is worried, as all actors are, that she has finally lost it all, and that audiences will hate her for everything, especially her German origins. …
Review: Pippin by Woodlawn Theatre
by Kurt Gardner
Published on February 18, 2017
This 1972 musical comedy is still a blast for modern audiences, as exemplified by the production now playing at the Woodlawn.
More than 40 years before he composed the music for the monster Broadway hit Wicked, Stephen Schwartz wrote the songs for Pippin, a much more modest production. In my opinion, it's the superior work. Though Wicked has proven irresistible to teenage girls, I find it to be overblown and repetitive, while Pippin is down-to-earth and, well – sweet. It’s also got emotional heft that sneaks up on you. Pippin tells the tale of …
Review: Old Times by Harold Pinter, Austin Shakespeare
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 17, 2017
At moments in Pinter's dramas the lines and words fall away, the cigarette smoke rises, and between them opens an abyss that can take you away, away. Odd how sometimes no words at all can make the play.
Old Times is about conversations among the post-imperial British ennui class of the 1960s. A couple who’ve made it well enough to live in a country home fairly close to the coast have in for a weekend an old girlfriend of the wife’s to reminisce about their old times as young and carefree Londoners. That’s it. Yes, seriously, that’s all there is of plot in this Pinter anthology play. One gathers in …
Review: The World According to Snoopy by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2017
Every second of the two hours of performance was thought out, mapped, drilled and rehearsed to easy perfection. These young pros entertain us mightily as they take us to Charles Schultz's sweet world.
It's not surprising that Kaitlin Hopkins, head of musical theatre at Texas State University, was motivated to bring the Peanuts gang back on stage. The director's note in the program of The World According to Snoopy, the reworking of a 1980's musical, reveals that her father was co-producer of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, the first musical with those characters. As a child Hopkins was taken to visit the cartoonist in Santa Rosa, California. Schulz drew the strip for …
Review #2 of 2: THE GREAT SOCIETY by Robert Schekkan, Zach Theatre, January 25 - March 5, 2017
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 12, 2017
The GREAT SOCIETY by Robert Schenkkan is one ponderous battleship of a stage presentation, driven forward by Steve Vinovich as LBJ, one of our most imperial presidents. It's a political and historical thriller.
The Great Society by Robert Schenkkan is one ponderous battleship of a stage presentation. At three hours and ten minutes, it could have won the Battle of the Phillippine Sea singlehandedly in extended combat, given its nonstop narrative discourses. People who lived through the tumultuous mid-sixties of the Johnson Administration can recall bits of the conversations and events of the time recreated in the play.Schenkkan has woven actual speeches by President Lyndon Baines Johnson …
Review #1 of 2: THE GREAT SOCIETY by Robert Schekkan, Zach Theatre, January 25 - March 5, 2017
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on February 12, 2017
Three acts, many characters, with a laugh or sigh or a gasp from the audience every five minutes. The script is marvelous: dense but easy to take in. Whether or not you know this period in U.S. history, but especially if you lived through it, I recommend this production.
Tour de force: a masterly or brilliant stroke, creation, effect or accomplishment. A tour de force is easily defined but not so easily described. So to say that Zach Theatre’s latest production, The Great Society, is a tour de force is accurate but not particularly enlightening. And yet this exact turn of phrase is required because of the generous scope of the play. It wouldn’t do to say things like well done, on point …