Recent Reviews
Review: Lone Riders by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 19, 2016
The portrait session is a tidily symbolic moment, a reminder that art, including this polished staging, captures ever so fleetingly the richness and complexity of life.
Lone Riders speaks of vast distances, and every aspect of the Trinity Street Players' production keys on that theme. This is the Nebraska Territory in 1865. From the first moments as the audience listens to Walker Lyle's musing cowboy music, the allied concepts of set designer David Weaver and lighting designer Courtney Deriger make that vastness real. A battered wooden shack for a stage depot, a barren courtyard, a bench, a tree, tools and the …
Review: Arden of Faversham by anonymous, City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 17, 2016
This contemporary 'noir' staging of ARDEN OF FAVERSHAM offers a banquet of guilty pleasures and the dessert of justice delivered.
Wicked wives, stupid husbands, thugs and murder; what's not to like? Director Kevin Gates gives the 1592 drama Arden of Faversham a canny spin by setting it as a contemporary noir tale, accenting the timelessness of the theme. It was pulp fiction when printed in Elizabethan England, and it's even more pulpy now. The company plays it straight, giving it a wicked edge, keeping the comedy quiet but in plain sight as Black Will and Shakebag the …
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 …