Recent Reviews
Review: Durang Durang by Oh Dragon Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 16, 2016
Dismaying first-half material gives way to three sketches that are coherent, mostly non-referential, and entertaining, done by a fully engaged and energetic company.
The 1994 collection of short theatre pieces by Christopher Durang done by Oh Dragon Theatre Company at the City Theatre is a writer's wastepaper basket, the sort of collection of scribblings that the Harry Ransom Center might treasure and ponder some twenty years from now. They seem wildly uneven. Everything before the intermission I found dismaying. Not because of the actors or the direction, except for the choice of the material in the first place. …
Review: She Loves Me by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 12, 2016
Confident romantic leads Cheyenne Barton and Matt Buzonas, comic Maureen Fenninger with her hungry heart of gold and other undergrads have plenty of stage time and fine musical opportunities.
There's a sweetness to She Loves Me, compounded of shop dust, wistfulness and perfume. Miklós László wrote this romantic comedy in 1937, shortly before abandoning his native Budapest for America. His gently humorous character-based tale about shop clerks seeking romance lent itself nicely to the 1941 MGM film The Little Shop Around the Corner with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, recycled in 1949 for the Judy Garland and Van Johnson musical In The Good Old Summertime. This …
Review: Memphis, the musical by Woodlawn Theatre
by Kurt Gardner
Published on April 12, 2016
Attractive leads and high-spirited performances help to maintain a level of energy that rises above the clichés of Joe DiPietro's by-the-numbers book.
Continuing its ongoing tradition of tackling big Broadway musicals, the Woodlawn Theatre brings the sprawling, Tony-winning musical Memphis to its stage, marking another success for this ambitious company. Set in the titular Tennessee town in the 1950s, this is the story of Huey Calhoun, a white high school dropout who parlays his love of rhythm and blues into a career as a boundary-breaking DJ at a time when African-Americans were still treated very much as …
Review: Secrets of a Soccer Mom by AtticRep
by Kurt Gardner
Published on April 09, 2016
Lockwood, DeLuna, and Tonra do the most they can with these simply-sketched characters, and their charismatic performances help to make the evening more enjoyable than it should be.
Theatergoers who will get the biggest kick out of Secrets of a Soccer Mom are, well, soccer moms — and perhaps the husbands and children who likewise have a ball in the game. For others, it’s pretty routine stuff. Kathleen Clark’s one-act plumbs all-too-familiar territory in its depiction of three young mothers who gradually bare their souls as they play a Sunday afternoon match against their sons. As they sit on the sidelines awaiting …
Review: A Flea in Her Ear by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 09, 2016
Director Michael Costello and the lively young cast do a bang-up job of producing this creaky but timeless classic. Gallic amusement at the foolishness of lust remains unbounded.
Sex farces never grow old because jealousy and foolishness are always with us. Georges Feydeau kept a table at Maxim's in Paris and produced one farce after another, some sixty in all staged over the 40 years before the First World War. A Flea in her Ear (Une Puce à l'Oreille) is by far the best known to English speakers but titles of others suggest that Feydeau knew when he was onto a good thing …
Review: Bright Half Life by Theatre en Bloc
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 06, 2016
Captured by the intensity in the Vortex 'pony shed,' one rapidly learns to accept and even embrace abrupt and profoundly disorienting leaps in time and context.
Theatre en Bloc has installed a jolting unpredictable time machine in the 'pony shed' at the Vortex, that orphaned little structure that's at the foot of the drinking deck and adjacent to the outdoor stage. Announced capacity is 15 persons, all classes of seating combined, from donors to regular admission types to the unmonied but curious who pay nothing. Director Jenny Lavery and company exercise some compassion and ingenuity, however, and Sunday evening's 8:30 p.m. …