Kitchen Dog Theater holds its annual New Works Festival with this new play by Zayd Dohrn as its central production. Set in a dirty Phoenix trucking office, the action unfolds in overlapping episodes in a story of human trafficking, paternal bullying, unlikely love and obsession, and brutal murder. What feels…
As a countdown to the Dallas Observer’s “Best of Dallas” 2010, City of Ate is serving up 100 of the favorite dishes we crave, savor and hope to scarf down again soon. These dishes are in no particular order. Some are little known, others celebrated. Some are pricey, others can…
As a countdown to the Dallas Observer’s “Best of Dallas” 2010, City of Ate is serving up 100 of the favorite dishes we crave, savor and hope to scarf down again soon. These dishes are in no particular order. Some are little known, others celebrated. Some are pricey, others can…
Scarlet fever, blindness, a blizzard and a crop-killing fire hit the Ingalls family in Little House on the Prairie, The Musical. And that’s just the first act. These hearty pioneers respond to disaster after disaster in typically hearty (theater) pioneer fashion—by singing spirited ballads and engaging in thigh-slapping yeehaw dancing…
As a countdown to the Dallas Observer’s “Best of Dallas” 2010, City of Ate is serving up 100 of the favorite dishes we crave, savor and hope to scarf down again soon. These dishes are in no particular order. Some are little known, others celebrated. Some are pricey, others can…
Nine innings of baseball can go three hours easy, so it’s remarkable that Most Valuable Player, a play about Jackie Robinson’s first three seasons in the majors, manages to work in spring training, a couple of World Series and an All-Star game in 70 minutes flat. The production at Dallas…
Dallas Opera’s triumphant world premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick is so un-opera in the traditional sense that it’s easier to describe it as new epic cinema in 3-D. With live actors. And lots of singing. About three hours’ worth, all aboard the Pequod in search of the mythical Great White…
Before you take the first bite of Screen Door’s tasso ham soup, pause a moment to listen. This soup talks to you. It’s a lady with a sweet Southern accent, speaking softly and gently into your ear. She says, “Come on, hon, eat up while it’s good ‘n’ hot, ’cause…
“Give Them What They Want” is the first number in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and the current entertainment model of Uptown Players, the company presenting the area’s first local production of the show. Giving the Uptown audience—a mostly middle-aged, predominantly gay male crowd of dedicated theatergoers—what they want means the occasional…
The pretty girl gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop in reasons to be pretty, the third and last installment in Dallas Theater Center’s ongoing trilogy of Neil LaBute’s Beauty Plays. In the first two—The Shape of Things and Fat Pig—the good-lookers have all the power. But in pretty, directed…
Funny how these dead writers keep coughing up new plays. Shakespeare’s got one, Cardenio, confirmed by British scholars earlier this year as a script the Bard based on Don Quixote. It was produced briefly during Shakespeare’s lifetime, then lost, only to be rediscovered recently by literary sleuths who found similar…
On a day when you’re feeling all up in your fine self, when your wrinkle-fillers have smoothed out the frown lines and your good car is out of the shop, that’s the day to go to Ocean Prime. Because any other day? You’re going to feel way out of place…
Nothing depicts teenagers’ lives with less authenticity than the typical musical about teenagers’ lives. Think about the kids in shows like High School Musical, Hairspray, and even Grease and Bye Bye Birdie, all populated with nuance-free, dumbed-down stereotypes. You get your studs and duds, preps and debs, sluts and hoods,…
Meet the burnouts of Burnfield, USA. The young adults of Eric Bogosian’s play subUrbia, now being done by Upstart Productions at The Green Zone, have turned the curbside at their local convenience store into an ersatz salon. They hang there every night and sometimes on toward dawn, drinking, smoking and…
A slab of Velveeta with Miracle Whip on a slice of white bread. For 90-year-old Grace, that’s a happy meal. That’s also a pretty accurate description of Tom Ziegler’s two-hander play Grace and Glorie, a soft, bland sandwich of comedy and pathos, and the latest effort by One Thirty Productions…
This ain’t your mother’s bistro. No, it’s your grandmother’s. And if you visit Tramontana of an evening, though not too long past the witching hour of 8, you’ll likely see a few other people’s grannies here too. They’ll be accompanied by nicely dressed adult grandchildren and, if some have been…
The egg must not be cold. Here we are in Oak Lawn’s dishiest new restaurant, DISH (the insistent capital letters an attempt to elevate the generic name). It is a frigid Saturday morning, and at 11:30 a.m., we two are the only patrons in a 5,500-square-foot space that seats about…
Neil LaBute and Nora Ephron. Now there’s a cage match waiting to happen. LaBute, the reigning American writer of terse stage and screen dramedies about women who love men who hate women, wrote one, The Shape of Things, about a man-hating woman who does to one nice guy what LaBute’s…
When Equus, a 1974 play by Peter Shaffer, returned to Broadway in 2008 after a successful revival in London, the sensation surrounding the stage debut of movie star Daniel Radcliffe—Harry Potter! Nude!—in the role of deranged, horse-killing teen Alan Strang, outshone the play itself. And for good reason. Turns out…
Theater provides its own version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. By observing an actor in performance, we, the audience, unwittingly change the behavior of that actor as he or she plays the part. It’s an apt metaphorical fit to the experience of watching Michael Frayn’s dazzling, difficult play Copenhagen, currently running…
Where would you rather be at the end of the world? In an underground bunker with a nervous gay biologist and not quite enough food? Or in a living room with Stephen Hawking and a plate of pastrami? We get the lighter side of Armageddon in two small, odd, funny…
Sometimes the sweet nobility of a heartfelt community theater production can make its flaws forgivable. At all-volunteer playhouses such as Richardson Theatre Centre and Onstage in Bedford, where this week’s shows were reviewed, they do it all for love. Nobody receives star treatment. There’s no complicated scenery, and they sport…
