Recent Reviews
Review: Other Desert Cities by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 21, 2015
Other Desert Cities is not a holiday play; but it does allow us to unwrap a mystery that turns out to be a gift to all concerned.
Sharp, contemporary and merciless, Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities has a lot to say. Just like protagonist Brooke Wyeth the young novelist who flamed out after an early success and suffered six years of writer's block and desperate depression. Brooke is visiting her parents in Palm Springs, that odd lush oasis in the California desert along I-10 east of Los Angeles. It's Christmastime, 2004, in the never-winter to which her parents have withdrawn in their …
21st Century Theatre: Texting and Gesturing the Future in Austin productions of DEUS EX MACHINA and THE BOWIE PROJECT
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 20, 2015
Can we truly perceive a new thing? Two Austin productions in 2015 are candidates for future-forward potential.
January A digitally obsessive audience, its thumbs working furiously, sits around a thrust stage in the Rollins Studio Theatre at the Long Center in Austin. Produced with The Fusebox Festival and Shrewd Productions, the play is Whirligig Productions’ Deus Ex Machina and the year is 2015. The audience members hurriedly text yes/no and either/or responses to prompts on a screen above suppliants at the stage Oracle of Delphi. The texts go to the number …
Review: The Threepenny Opera by Trinity University
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 19, 2015
Amy Rossini as the squalling, swiling, worldly-wise Mrs. Peachum doesn't court the audience so much as bowl them over with her pep, focus and singing.
It must be a thrill to perform in that jangly, dissonant and exuberant Brecht-Weil world of The Threepenny Opera, especially for college-age artists. It portrays a society turned upside down, one in which we're rooting for a an elegantly carefree, immoral and unrepentant thief and murderer. The wealthy and the bourgeois exclude and exploit the denizens of the Victorian underworld, and Macheath (the stylish Alejandro Cardona) hasn't the slightest remorse about beguiling and betraying the …
Nahum Tate, Knock-offs, Lear and 'Tatefication'
by Stephen Meigs
Published on November 18, 2015
Nahum Tate fits Willy Loman’s definition of a loser: “He was liked… but not well liked.”
Toward a Traditional Trampling of the Reputation of Mr. Nahun Tate The History Of King Lear, Nahum Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic, was popular for 150 years. But that’s not his only claim to fame. Tate also wrote lyrics for a Christmas carol still sung today, “While Shepherds watched their flocks at night, ” here performed by the King’s College Choir in 2011. No Blanche Dubois, Mr. Tate had no use …
Review: To Kill a Mockingbird by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2015
To Kill A Mockingbird maintains Harper Lee's condemnation of petty, malevolent and racist small-town Alabama while holding out hope for the future.
Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird is a comfortable and familiar story, an immediate success when it was published in 1960. My cousins in a small town in south Alabama were about the same age as Scout, the protagonist. They embraced the story and Harper Lee's sensitive portrait of small town life and the appalling effects of know-nothing racism. It took me a bit longer. First, because I didn't read the novel or see the 1962 …
Review: The Dumbwaiter by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 12, 2015
The Capital T production capitalizes on the acumen and presence of Webster and Phelps, who with director/set designer Mark Pickell constitute a sort of Three Musketeers of edgy comedy.
Thin and yet deep, apparently superficial but disturbingly suggestive, Harold Pinter's The Dumbwaiter was his second play, a one-act written in 1957. The production by Capital T Theatre is accomplished, eerie and aggravating -- all of which are qualities that marked Pinter's works throughout a fifty-year career recognized by the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature. Ill at the time and unable to travel, Pinter videotaped his Nobel lecture. In the opening passage he said, …