Recent Reviews
Review: Art/Model Show: Subject by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 04, 2016
This session was anything but static. I slipped away into the cool Austin evening with the strong feeling that I had been somehow embraced.
I slipped away into the cool Austin evening after Art Model Show: Subject with the strong feeling that I had been somehow embraced. The performance wasn't lengthy. For just over an hour the spectators -- no, call us paying guests -- had sat quietly in the studio, clutching sketchbooks and pencils while taking in the huddle of six artists working at their easels and the five undraped figure models positioned variously on platforms before them. …
Review: Twelfth Night by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 04, 2016
The clever vigor of UT's undergraduate actors in a design evoking magic and transformation provides an entirely satisfying Twelfth Night for devotees and newbies alike.
Traffic was at a near standstill at the University of Texas campus in Austin last Saturday half an hour before the opening of Twelfth Night. I had to take a circuitous route, commit myself to a long line ol cars waiting to enter the parking garage near Longhorns Stadium and fork over a $10 'event parking' fee. But not because of the production at the 244-seat Oscar Brockett Theatre at the UT Department of Theatre …
Review: The Realistic Joneses by Hyde Park Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 27, 2016
Incongruities, socially unacceptable outbursts, surprising changes and confessions -- Eno's baffling characters show courage, stoic or reluctant, in facing adversities of shared existence.
Will Eno writes funny characters. And they're not funny ha-ha; they're funny strange. Disconnected. Earnest, inept and trapped in cold joyless individual worlds that bounce off one another as if they're walking around inside invisible force fields. I was baffled when Ken Webster and Hyde Park Theatre regulars presented Eno's Tragedy: A Tragedy in 2013, and it's just as well that I had another CTXLiveTheatre reviewer to cover it. I told myself then that …
Review: As You Like It by Shrewd Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 24, 2016
The Shrewds' ingenious AS YOU LIKE IT does the piece proud -- it's an enchantment to be cherished.
This is a land of dreams, enchanted and enchanting. As You Like It is always fun, and this production is something special. Director Lily Wolff draws into this magic circle both familiar Austin devotees of Shakespeare performance and attractive newcomers. And the Shrewd company is just that: knowledgeable, confident, plausible and entirely winning. Set initially in the court of an irascible and usurping duke, it's a quick-moving tale of women friends' escape to the forest …
Review: The Mikado Reclaimed by Generic Ensemble Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2016
They're not going to ask you if you liked the show. Anyone who likes what they see portrayed here is a dark and twisted soul.
At the talk-back following the performance they're not going to ask you if you liked the show. Anyone who likes what they see portrayed here is a dark and twisted soul. The co-director of the Vortex Repertory asks you to volunteer a word or phrase expressing your reaction to the relentlessly grim world of captivity and exploitation of Asian women, a Muslim woman and an Asian man who may be gay. That dark crude …
Review: The Government Inspector by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 18, 2016
All the town's characters are stereotypes of self-importance, ripe for deflating. In the busy and buoyant action Gogol, Hatcher and director Polgar puncture them deftly and often.
Nikolai Gogol was only 25 when The Government Inspector was presented and published, and he'd already made a reputation for himself as a writer of short stories and the historical romance Taras Bulba, set in the Cossack region of his origins. Gogol had also proved an ignorant disaster when appointed professor of medieval history at the University of St. Petersburg. A romantic fleeing from his modest origins among the petty nobility of the Ukraine, he'd made …