Time is an illusion, said Albert Einstein. No past, no future. Just existence in the dimension we perceive as the present. The theory of relativity might explain why Shakespeare Dallas director Raphael Parry has taken a 90-minute comedy, The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), and stretched it out to…

For a guy who murders two men and drives a 13-year-old girl to suicide, Romeo sure gets good PR spin in history. Thanks to William Shakespeare and centuries of skewed interpretation, “Romeo” is now synonymous with “great lover.” But considering what the boy gets up to in Romeo & Juliet,…

Without actor B.J. Cleveland at the ready, Uptown Players could not have produced Douglas Carter Beane’s marvelous dark comedy The Nan ce. Cleveland is one of Dallas theater’s most versatile veterans, the sort of all-around, locally revered professional who bounces into leading roles in comedies, musicals, children’s shows and, too…

Nobody gets their fingernails done in Manicures & Monuments, a 30-year-old play by Dallas playwright Vicki Caroline Cheatwood that’s on in a respectably acted but outsized revival at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Think of it as Golden Girls meeting Steel Magnolias in a run-down nursing home in rural Oklahoma. Instead of…

Audacity Productions’ Dallas Solo Fest at the Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park is presenting its second celebration of short shows written and performed by brave souls who aren’t afraid to go it alone. The standouts from the first weekend of the eight-show festival were Jill Vice’s Tipped & Tipsy…

The best play running on any Dallas stage right now is Precious Little, currently on at the Bath House Cultural Center. The best actor on any Dallas stage right now is in it — Sherry Jo Ward. In the production of Madeleine George’s strange, brief, beautiful play, directed with gentle…

William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays without any character ever turning to another to say “Are you OK?” The two main characters in Amy Herzog’s 90-minute, four-person drama Belleville say it a lot. The lazy little linguistic glitch is the mark of a playwright less concerned about the literary merits of…

Kitchen Dog Theater’s final play in its longtime home at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary is The Firestorm. What a title for a damp squib of drama by Meridith Friedman, getting an undeserved “rolling premiere” starting at KDT and moving on to other theaters elsewhere. Directed by Tina Parker, The Firestorm…

The smartest man in Radio Golf isn’t the man with money. That’s just one of the home truths in August Wilson’s final play in his epic 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle. African American Repertory Theatre’s strong production of Radio Golf benefits from sharp, well-directed performances by five hometown actors who click with…

As soon as word got around over the weekend that Theatre Three founder and producing director Jac Alder had died, local actors and others started swapping stories. Alder, 80, had been hospitalized last month with pneumonia and was in ICU for several weeks, but had rallied and returned home to…

Believe the man in the purple pants when he says he cannot tell the truth. He is the title character in The Liar, a 400-year-old comedy by Pierre Corneille remade in 2012 into a rip-snortin’ rhyming farce by Venus in Fur playwright David Ives, working on a commission from the…

A sweeping novel like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility isn’t one that travels easily to the stage. Too many picnics, rainstorms, carriage rides and strolls down country lanes in the 19th-century classic. The 1995 film did it right. Director Ang Lee had an all-star British cast led by actress Emma…

Watching Danny O’Connor’s new dark comedy one-act The Down Low, set in a 956-square-foot house on East Mockingbird Lane, is like living inside a Tarantino film for 75 minutes. Bad things happen to people just inches away from where you’re sitting. Hilarious things, too. Every time there’s a knock on…

When Matthew Posey, the creative genius at the tiny Ochre House theater, decides to get silly with a new play, he gets crazy-silly. That’s a good thing right now. We need some lighthearted whimsy to ward off the heavy bad-news blues, and The Egg Salesman, Posey’s ova-easy new comedy, is…

Newsies is Annie with boys. And not young boys either, at least not the cast of the touring production currently tapping, back-flipping and flexed-foot kicking across the stage at the Winspear Opera House. These aren’t moppets or teenagers. This is a bunch of cute but short-statured young men pretending to…

You don’t have to be in love with the old play-with-music Lady in the Dark to appreciate its artful sophistication. It’s an odd one, more psychodrama than full-out musical; there are only 65 minutes of singing spread out over two and a half hours. But because it’s almost never produced…

For some playwrights, winning the Pulitzer Prize for a first or second play marks the end of a promising career as a dramatist. It happened with Margaret Edson and her 1999 Pulitzer winner W;t (she’s never written another play). With Charles Fuller and A Soldier’s Play (1982). And with Paul…

A small show that packs a mighty emotional wallop, the four-person musical Ordinary Days has a few more performances by Our Productions Theatre Company in the studio space at Addison’s Theatre Center. If you like bittersweet sung-through mini-musicals like [title of show], this one, just 80 minutes long, will leave…

As a play about football, but not just about football, Colossal packs more action and drama into its four 15-minute quarters (plus 10-minute “halftime show”) than most actual games. Now running at the Wyly Theatre, Dallas Theater Center’s production of Andrew Hinderaker’s 75-minute drama-with-dance, staged by DTC artistic director Kevin…

Like the canned meat product for which it’s named, the musical comedy Spamalot is a funny-looking conglomerate of weird ingredients, some easily identifiable, some a bit gross. Granbury Theatre Company, the community-based troupe at the historic Granbury Opera House south of Fort Worth, has a tasty fry-up of Monty Python’s…

Dallas Summer Musicals, so often the host of half-baked road-weary tours of recent Broadway flops, has produced its own fairly lavish and beautifully cast revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic The King and I, now winding up its short run at Fair Park. It’s a good time to get…