Bring on the Mamet. Cue up some Neil LaBute. Somebody, quick, stage something full of cussin’ and screwin’ and gettin’ all nekkid. A month into the ongoing Horton Foote Festival on local stages, the surfeit of antimacassars and rocking chairs in these folksy, G-rated works is wearing me to a…
A splendid play happens offstage during Horton Foote’s Pulitzer-winning The Young Man from Atlanta, now running at Uptown Players at the Kalita Humphreys Theater. If only the action out front were as entertaining as the stuff we never see. Throughout this static little drama, the latest entry in the ongoing…
Before the hunky undead teens of Twilight, there were the hunky immortal brothers of Tuck Everlasting, the 1975 young adult novel by Natalie Babbitt. The popular book was adapted for the stage by Mark J. Frattaroli and in the lovely production now running at Dallas Children’s Theater, the story focuses…
Where there’s a will, there’s a way for greedy family members to fight about who gets what and how much. In Horton Foote’s internecine 1989 comedy Dividing the Estate, members of the Gordon family also want to know how soon they’ll get their mitts on their mama’s money. The sooner…
Having trouble getting cast in shows as a young actor new to Dallas eight years ago, Steven Walters made a bold move: He started his own theater company (with the help of four other fellow Baylor alums) and hasn’t stopped working since. Second Thought Theatre, based in Addison and now…
Theatre Three’s downstairs dungeon Theatre Too is exactly the right space in which to stage Christopher Durang’s semi-absurd political satire Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. In the play’s disturbing, dystopian world, the only safe place to be is a windowless bunker safely out of the…
Monday, on what would have been their father’s 95th birthday, the four children of Pulitzer- and two-time Academy Award-winning playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote celebrated the launch of the area-wide festival of his work at a party in the lobby of the Winspear Opera House. Actors and directors from many…
WaterTower Theatre’s tenth annual Out of the Loop Fringe Festival is a busy buffet of talent spread among three venues at the sprawling Addison venue. You can gorge yourself on all the offerings over 11 days, or just pick and choose, nibbling among the ones you’ve heard are good. With…
Dallas Theater Center’s artistic director Kevin Moriarty announced the company’s 53rd season of shows today, and it includes a couple of giant productions — including Giant, the much-anticipated new musical by Michael John LaChiusa (book by Sybille Pearson) based on the 1952 Edna Ferber novel. The season features four regional…
In ancient times, there were “air hostesses.” If you have never been through an airport without being forced to remove footwear, you are too young to remember pretty armies of exotic airline goddesses in kicky miniskirts and calf-hugging boots. They were the go-go geishas of international travel, stirring cocktails and…
Robert Wuhl is bringing his solo show Assume the Position to the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at WaterTower Theatre in Addison next week. The two-week festival opens tomorrow with a lineup of more than 20 different performances of drama, dance, music and comedy. It’s an enjoyably freewheeling theater…
They’re up to new tricks at Matthew Posey’s Ochre House theater, that odd little hotbox of freakishly entertaining original work written, directed by and starring Mr. Posey. His latest is Memphos!, a 90-minute look at the last performance of the last-worst act in old-timey vaudeville. Posey plays the title character,…
Dallas Theater Center has done the only reasonable thing it could to make that nuttiest of old chestnuts, Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, bearable. In the leads are two big Broadway stars, Tony winner (and Fort Worth native) Betty Buckley and four-time Tony nominee Tovah Feldshuh. That…
Dallas Opera’s Romeo & Juliet opens tonight at the Winspear. Staging the piece by Charles Gounod (sung in French with English supertitles) is Michael Kahn, the highly respected Shakespeare expert from the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where he’s brought the works of the Bard to audiences for 25…
This week’s big event over at the shiny barn in Arlington is all about possession of the pigskin, right? Coincidentally, Dallas Children’s Theater, named by Time magazine one of the country’s top five professional theaters for young audiences, has a stage filled with porkers. And one really unhappy wolf. DCT…
Deconstruct the features of Dallas actor Steven Walters and it’s hard to believe they constitute the attributes of a great stage performer. There’s his voice: high, a little nasal, with a hint of Texas twang and audible hisses on sibilant consonants. There’s his chin, strong but soft. His long nose…
As a cultural, historical icon exploited for stage and screen, Frankenstein’s Monster is right up there with Jesus, Abe Lincoln and Santa Claus. You know the Monster at first glance: bolts through the neck, Cro Magnon forehead, ugly shoes. With a vocabulary limited to “fire bad!” and “friend good!,” he…
“It isn’t easy being green,” sang Kermit the Frog. For actor Preston Truman Boyd, starring as the mad doctor’s stitched-together Monster in the Broadway tour of Mel Brooks’ musical comedy Young Frankenstein playing at the Winspear Opera House through January 23, being green isn’t the half of it. He also…
Feels good to start the theater year with some laughs. First show of 2011, Death Is No Small Change!, is right on the money. It’s the new comedy from Pegasus Theatre, now performing its yearly three-week run at the Eisemann Center in Richardson. There’s nothing like a Pegasus show and…
Pegasus Theatre makes the fans of its “Living Black and White” comedies wait a year for a new show. This new one bears evidence that playwright-actor Kurt Kleinmann spent much of 2010 polishing the details. Script, sets, costumes and casting are right on the money in this latest in Kleinmann’s…
Funny how the little moments in some plays stay with you. An actor wiping a tear from his cheek in a quiet scene in Our Town. That same actor, Joey Folsom, angrily tearing through a package of Oreos in subUrbia. Estelle Parsons reeling down the stairs in August: Osage County…
For the past few months at Dallas Theater Center, Mark Hadley was forgotten but not gone. He announced last July that after 10 years as managing director of the city’s largest professional theater, he would be leaving for a new job. But he stayed mum about what the new gig…
