Recent Reviews
The Devil and the Details: A Review of Austin Playhouse’s The Philadelphia Story
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on December 11, 2015
The spell has been cast. It would be folly to single out any individual performer in this review, since the cast as a whole is so delightful.
The atmosphere is tense but not too tense: family members mill about the living room preparing for the second wedding of the eldest daughter. The nervousness is almost rote, stakes not being quite as high as, say, those for a first wedding. The mother titters about with last minute details.The bride to be makes declarative but none-too bold statements, and the butler is prompt and complacent. Nearly all of them take a moment to bark at the …
Review: Now Now Oh Now by the Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 07, 2015
Entertaining, thought-provoking and a touch disturbing, this bracing 70 minutes of play is deeply serious. Just like the Rude Mechs themselves.
The Rude Mechs are looking for exactly thirty spectactor-participants to fill the seats at each performance in Now Now Oh Now. Or perhaps I should say at each experience of the work, for they carefully structure it to make those numerological thirty transit with them through the varieties of theatrical experience. Dress warmly, friends, for you'll wait in the yard outside the Off Center until summoned. The Rudes now promise to have a fire, which …
Tonight’s Gonna be a Good Night: A Review of Zach Theatre’s A Christmas Carol, 2015
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on December 03, 2015
In a cornucopia of musical selections director Dave Steakley finds the heartbeat of this production, and let me tell you: It's a very, very rapid heartbeat.
EXPLOSIVE AND CHARMING, two adjectives very little aligned, are actually the most apt description for Zach Theatre’s 2015 interpretation of Charles’ Dicken’s classic A Christmas Carol (ACC). An usher in the lobby warned me on the way in, “Take everything you remember about A Christmas Carol from your childhood and forget it.” His endearing enthusiasm was enough to excite the most suspicious Scrooge in the place. And true enough, the performance took a few liberties with the …
Review: Parade by Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on December 03, 2015
Without elaborated stageplay, the music and storytelling of Parade seem condensed and enriched, adding to the power of a story about prejudice.
Parade by Robert Uhry and Jason Robert Brown is the story of the mob murder of Leo Frank, whose story ignited a powerful movement for justice in the early 20th centuryUnited States and led directly to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. The musical is up for a very short run now at Ground Floor Theatre, 979 Springdale Road in east Austin. It's an impressive work of art and a compelling up-to-the-minute statement on our own perilous times. …
Review: Dracula by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 28, 2015
For those like my sixth-grade friend Charlie who take Stoker and Shelly as serious as the Kabbala, this one's a must-see.
I met -- and avoided -- Dracula at an early age. Mly sixth-grade friend Charlie was fascinated by the classic narratives of Gothic horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He pressed them upon me, but their quaint and creepy 19th century style was too much. Reading their prose was like pulling a dust-laden velvet curtain back to look for a corpse in a coffin. Later I absorbed the 'horror movie' images of both, comfortingly comical, …
Review: Evita by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 22, 2015
Texas State University's EVITA was gripping and rich, a virtually flawless production of a classic of twentieth-century musical theatre.
Texas State University's production of Evita lit up like fireworks last week at the year-old Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre, a palace to the arts that puts most other performing spaces in Central Texas to shame. And like a fireworks display it surged and dazzled and then in a moment was gone. There's an unfortunate inevitability to programming there by the Theatre Department and the Musical Theatre Program: despite the talent, polish and setting, their theatrical …