Recent Reviews
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 …
Review: Born Yesterday by Classic Theatre of San Antonio
by Kurt Gardner
Published on May 03, 2016
In this time capsule Hayley Burnside delivers a convincing transition from a gum-snapping, happy-go-lucky chorus girl to a deep thinker who’s growing a conscience.
A crowd-pleasing hit when it opened on Broadway in 1946, Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday now plays like an interesting time capsule of the attitudes and mores of the postwar era. That said, the production now playing at San Antonio’s Classic Theatre has been so well-cast — and is performed so engagingly — that it breathes new life into the occasionally heavy-handed piece. Corrupt junk dealer Harry Block (Greg Hinojosa) arrives in Washington with his mistress, Billie …
Review: Good People by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 28, 2016
Nina Bryant's Margie the scrappy little Boston Southie mutt is sharp edges and soft center, a woman hiding psychological bruises behind dogged let's-get-through-this-one-day optimism..
I rarely stand to applaud at curtain calls, but even a theatre reviewer's scrupulous neutrality can be overwhelmed. Last Saturday when Nina Bryant who plays the protagonist of Good People stepped out to cap the actors' acknowledgements, I surged to my feet. Her creation of Margie the scrappy little Southie mutt of an abandoned wife was sharp edges and soft center, a woman hiding psychological bruises behind dogged let's-get-through-this-one-day optimism. You are sitting in the …
Review: Hamlet (7-person version based on First Folio) by Present Company Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 27, 2016
You awaken from the spell at the end of the night to realize that you've been captivated in Shakespeare's bubble of eternity, and you wish that it wasn't at an end.
It's undeniable: Hamlet is dark. When we first see him, the protagonist acknowledges to his mother his "nighted color" and replies that "'tis not only my inky cloak, good mother/Nor customary suits of solemn black." But mourning garb is only a minor symbolic indication of the vast darkness that lies across this story. It starts on darkened battlements with a ghost and soon returns there; and the darkness within men's souls is blacker and grimmer …
Review: The Wars of Heaven: Smackdown! by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 25, 2016
'Smackdown' is ambitious, and it takes on too many perceived evils at once. See it, by all means, and meditate upon it as you wait to see what this restless genius is going to come up with for Part III of the Wars of Heaven.
Connor Hopkins, artistic diector of Trouble Puppet Theatre Company, takes on the whole of Catholic theology and the idiocy of contemporary media. With puppets. So how can you resist? The first part of Connor's meditation, The Wars of Heaven, Part 1 in May, 2015, challenged audiences to soar in the skies and across the centuries, using John Milton's imaginative cosmology as expressed in the company's familiar bunraku style augmented by some impressive shadow puppetry. …
Review: Romeo and Juliet by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 23, 2016
Love and Death share the stage equally in a production that's especially muscular, exciting and full of conflict.
There's this dreamy romantic notion about Romeo and Juliet, one that doesn't get much farther than the Capulet garden, the balcony, and the flattered surprise of sweet Juliet when her longed-for dreamboat comes scrambling out of the darkness. Innocence joined with ardor, two almost-grownups taking their love lives in hand and pledging them to one another. Sigh. But there's also the truth of the Facebook meme about R&J being the story of two …