More than anything, Aaron Kozak’s two-act play The Birthday Boys is about what mean little boys big men can be, even when they’re big, bad Marines. Onstage at the Texas Theatre through Sunday, May 29, the play, also directed by Kozak, is a study in what happens to men under…
Theater Caps are bite-sized punch-packing capsule reviews by resident theater critic Elaine Liner. Use them as a reminder — or a teaser, if you procrastinate — of her full-length reviews in The Mixmaster’s weekly sister. American Idol has named its latest winner, Scotty “Lockemdoors” McCreery, but don’t feel too bad…
Two blond, big-haired, big-boobed icons stare down on the action in the musicals Rock of Ages and 9 to 5. In Rock of Ages, whose Broadway tour is now at the Winspear Opera House, the guardian angel is Angelyne, the odd Mae West-like creature whose pneumatic cleavage once decorated billboards…
The Bernie Madoff case hovers over Ponzi, the new play by Elaine Romero getting its world premiere as the mainstage production in the New Works Festival at Kitchen Dog Theater. A mysterious investment genius named Jack guarantees high returns on the millions entrusted to him. It takes at least $6…
One Thirty Productions is selling out the house at the Bath House Cultural Center right now with the world premiere of its new comedy, The Mystery of Miz Arnette. The play by Ronnie Claire Edwards and Alan Bailey is set in the days of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, the 1930s,…
“Chateau Cardboard” is how art instructor Renata Sharman describes most of the wine poured into plastic cups at Painting with a Twist, the art-class-cum-happy-hour studio in Garland. It’s BYOB here, but everything else is provided: canvas, paints, brushes and paper plate palettes. They also provide the subject. Thursday night, 10…
Theater Caps are bite-sized punch-packing capsule reviews by resident theater critic Elaine Liner. Use them as a reminder — or a teaser, if you procrastinate — of her full-length reviews in The Mixmaster’s weekly sister. A talking pig opens the show The Butcher, the dark new musical written and directed…
Theater Caps are bite-sized punch-packing capsule reviews by resident theater critic Elaine Liner. Use them as a reminder — or a teaser, if you procrastinate — of her full-length reviews in The Mixmaster’s weekly sister. For a playwright, getting a new play “up on its feet” is the first step…
Every production at Matthew Posey’s Ochre House theater goes to a dark place in some way. His latest, the musical The Butcher, sounds intriguingly perverse. Written and directed by Posey, who also stars, the show is described by its creator as “Kurt Weill meets Irish folklore.” Set in Ireland during…
Three intriguing trends emerged during a week of seeing new plays at small playhouses: the simple but stunning effect of actors’ faces lit with tiny handheld flashlights; plots about murders in dark environs; and animals as pivotal characters (a monkey in one show, a pig in another). Some strange and…
Choreographer Kelly Devine is all too aware what happens when you Google her. “I have to tell everyone at the first rehearsal of a show that I am NOT the porn star,” she says. Same name, way different career paths. These days the non-porn Kelly Devine is in big demand,…
It has to feel good to Debbie Reynolds that she’s outlived Elizabeth Taylor. Now a pert and pretty 79, Reynolds was the star of Singin’ in the Rain and The Unsinkable Molly Brown and more recently is known not just as the real-life “mother of Princess Leia” (Carrie Fisher) but…
Theater Caps are bite-sized punch-packing capsule reviews by resident theater critic Elaine Liner. Use them as a reminder — or a teaser, if you procrastinate — of her full-length reviews in The Mixmaster’s weekly sister. There is one visually stunning image in UTD professor Thomas Riccio’s new play blahblah, now…
Turnaround time from Broadway to Dallas is getting shorter. The AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Lexus Broadway Series has just added the current Lincoln Center and West End hit play War Horse to its 2012-’13 season at the Winspear Opera House. The play, currently up for five Tony Awards, has become…
If things are unusually quiet on some local stages right now, it’s because most of the biggest, baddest voices in Dallas musical theater are singing like mad in Broadway Our Way, the annual fundraising revue at Oak Lawn’s Uptown Players. The cast is an all-star lineup of area divas and…
Flamenco is on fire in this town starting May 11 at Central Market stores as part of their Pasaporte Espana event celebrating the food and culture of Spain. Who knew that flamenco, the sexy Spanish dance with gypsy roots, has been building a big following here over the past five…
Doing a play set in a cave is a redundant move at Theatre Too, which itself is a dark grotto some 30 steps below The Quadrangle. The play that opened last night at Theatre Too, Language of Angels by Naomi Iizuka, is about a group of hick kids in North…
Despite what some audience members are saying about actor Wade McCollum’s impressive display of physique in Dallas Theater Center’s flesh-baring production of the Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret, his chiseled abs are not tricked out by makeup. McCollum earned them the hard way, with 90 minutes a day of tough…
Life may be a cabaret, old chum, but Cabaret onstage is not Cabaret the 1972 Bob Fosse movie. The sprawling, super-sized Cabaret that just opened at the Dallas Theater Center downtown is its own animal, an irresistibly sexy beast, even when it’s indulging in wretched excess and heavy-handed messages. Get…
In the geometry of a love triangle, the three sides are rarely equal. Somebody has to be the hypotenuse, loving the wrong person, giving too much or too little. Red Light Winter, the steamy three-character play by Adam Rapp that just opened a scorching-good production at Addison’s Second Thought Theatre,…
With a little help from her friends, the title character in Theatre Nouveau 47’s silly, sometimes thrilling Alice in Wonderland and Other Hallucinations takes a high-flying tumble down the rabbit hole. Using the dreamlike, no-frills adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s stories by Andre Gregory and The Manhattan Project, the little company…
“This is the society we’re living in,” rants angry-guy podcaster/comedian Adam Carolla. “You can order iced tea and get something that tastes like somebody took a pillowcase of potpourri and boiled it.” Ask for iced tea at Alma, the latest addition to Consilient Restaurants’ Henderson Avenue collection (along with Hibiscus…
