Recent Reviews
Review: Poor Herman by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 14, 2016
A beautiful, fresh theatrical experience, POOR HERMAN is bold, transgressive, and the best single choice among several good shows in Austin in May.
Poor Herman is a beautiful, fresh theatrical experience from paper chairs theatre company. This group is more than a little committed to experiment, and its artists are surefooted in giving us new thoughts, new stagings, new feelings and, perhaps, some originality. Last year’s Mast and this year’s Art/Model Show: Subject are evidence for this bold statement. In Austin only a few can claim the turf of the new. Among them are paper chairs, the Rude Mechanicals, Physical …
Review: As Butterflies, a new musical by Austin Jewish Repertory Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 13, 2016
This is a gentle staging of unimaginable events, one that squeezes the heart and admonishes one never to forget.
The immensity of the German state's murders of innocents over the decade that ended in 1945 is beyond words and in fact beyond comprehension. Those wth living memories of those world-shattering years are disappearing into the great night of time, and even the starkest images have acquired a comforting sepia tint. It was all so long ago. Almost all of us are now enfolded in the glittery superficiality of a U.S. popular culture. The …
Review: A Chorus Line by Playhouse San Antonio
by Kurt Gardner
Published on May 11, 2016
A CHORUS LINE is over 40, but there's still a universal message to be gleaned here -- and the songs all hold up nicely.
Winner of nine Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, A Chorus Line is the ultimate tribute to those unheralded background performers who aren’t necessarily looking for Broadway stardom but are driven by the unquenchable need to perform. Even if some of the references may be starting to show their age (the show is over 40, after all), there’s still a universal message to be gleaned here — and the songs all hold up nicely. Set …
Review: The Lark by Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 11, 2016
Anouilh admonishes that you cannot explain Joan, any more than you can explain the tiniest flower growing by the wayside.
With a decade of public performances of Elizabethan and early modern theatre behind them, the Baron's Men offer an adroit and subtle change of mode at the lakeside Elizabethan-style Curtain Theatre. The Lark is a costume drama, richly draped, and it's set in 1430, the period exactly contemporaneous with the settings of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays. It shares a principal character with them: Joan of Arc, the maid of Orleans who rose from peasant obscurity to …
Review: Witchcraft in Their Lips by University of Texas (other)
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 09, 2016
These few, this band of sisters of 'Untamed Shakespeare,' have taken deep draughts of the pure source material and are celebrating Shakespeare with the fervor the Bacchae celebrated Dionysus.
A swift-moving though at times bewildering collection of scenes from Shakespeare's histories, Witchcraft in their Lips closets you with a dozen women reveling in scenes mined from eight of Shakespeare's eight history plays. Stephanie Donowho and Nell McKeown, not featured in that dozen, collected and arranged these excerpts in an effort to evaluate Shakespeare's female characters, depicted in plots of vigorous masculine struggle. While confirming that many of the plays, especially the histories, …
Review: The Tempest - An Aerial Tale by Renaissance Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 07, 2016
Renaissance Austin’s Tempest with its largely mute Ariel and ranting Prospero doesn’t offer many pear-shaped tones but makes up for that with spectacle and surprise.
It helps to know Shakespeare’s plot before you attend the Renaissance Austin/Sky Candy production of The Tempest. Lorella Loftus’s adaptation cuts a lot of text to reduce playing time to just over two hours including a 15-minute intermission. Aerial gymnastics on silks, rings and trapezes take a lot of stage time and don't necessarily advance the story. She also makes significant modifications. As a framing device an aged Prospero meditates in his library before and …