Recent Reviews
Review: The Curious by Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 02, 2017
The pauses in Bottle Alley's THE CURIOUS speak unbounded stories. Writer-director Chris Fontanes has again bound a group of explorers in a mystery and invited the witnesses along. The case remains both solved and unresolved. As in life, we'll have to be satisfied with that.
Writer-director Chris Fontanes prefers the shadow worlds of mystery, enigma and the threatening unseen. Forced to turn to 'found' spaces, his essentially penniless and well named Bottle Alley Theatre Company makes a virtue of that necessity by incorporating the environment fully into the action. Their cryptic parables don't hang like abstract art from the surfaces of scenery flats on a stage. The Curious is set in a modest but comfortable bungalow in Austin's south-of-the-lake 78704: …
Review: A Girl Named Sue by Color Arc Productions
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 26, 2017
Christine Hoang's bilingual English-and-Vietnamese A GIRL NAMED SUE does not stop at harshly lit explications of the problems—we see those every day—but instead it prompts us to think forward to practical solutions.
A Girl Named Sue is an innocuous, almost innocent, title for a powerful and hardhitting stage presentation. Other theatre productions in town currently tout their relevance to our political and social state of affairs, and many have called for a new discussion of race in America. Without much fanfare, A Girl Named Sue actually delivers the punch, showing and telling us much about ourselves. This proverbial mirror held up to America is formed of numerous …
Review: The Tempest by Classic Theatre of San Antonio
by Kurt Gardner
Published on February 23, 2017
The Bard's comic drama gets the royal treatment in the Classic Theatre's new production.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Considered by scholars to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote entirely on his own, The Tempest is also one of his best-loved works. Typical of the Bard, the plot combines dramatic elements with comedy, but here the blending of genres is more successful than in his “problem plays.” Mark McCarver’s production, now playing at the Classic …
Review: An Iliad by Penfold Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2017
Cami Alys as the poet and narrator of AN ILIAD is transcendent, and the staging at the historic Scottish Rite Theatre is exactly right for this superb venture into the howling heart of mankind.
We walked away afterwards stunned and wordless. My wife was moved to tears. From the interpretation of an epic poem written nearly three thousand years ago. This is the power of theatre and this is a performance and interpretation that must not be missed. Essential if you want to understand why the art form refuses to die; essential if you're not frightened by huge themes of life, death, love and war; essential if you want …
Review: The Secret Garden, musical by Playhouse San Antonio
by Kurt Gardner
Published on February 22, 2017
Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon's modern classic comes to the Playhouse San Antonio in a strikingly revisualized production.
The Tony Award-winning 1991 musical The Secret Garden is a beautiful show with a memorable score that can be adapted any number of ways to good effect. As a case in point, the version now playing at the Playhouse San Antonio takes that idea to heart, featuring a strikingly minimal, impressionistic scenic design in place of the more traditional, foliage- and furniture-laden set that audiences would expect in an Edwardian-era theatrical – and it works …
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. They …