“Getting to No,” by Jim Schutze, February 12 Blame Uncle Sammy As a native and resident of New Orleans who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina, I was mortified to see comments by your columnist Jim Schutze. He made disparaging, false comments about New Orleans while discussing a project which is…
Goodbye, winter blues. Hello Human Female, springing from the wildly funny imagination of Texas playwright Matt Lyle, arrives as a late Valentine to the willy-nilly silliness of love among lovable misfits. In its world premiere by Audacity Theatre Lab at the tiny Ochre House Theatre next to Fair Park, Lyle’s…
There’s not a single gay character onstage in the latest play by Sordid Lives writer Del Shores. But the forced estrangement from her gay son gives main character Willadean Winkler (Cindee Mayfield) the motivation to ditch her abusive husband, break out of her dreary trailer park life and get a…
In a windowless, climate-controlled chamber on the third floor of the Dedman Life Sciences building at Southern Methodist University, thousands of fruit flies are on a diet so someday you won’t have to be. The crumb-sized insects, weighing just 1 milligram each, live in slim glass and plastic tubes—100 flies…
Not a bad time to invest in an entertainment stimulus package. Two just-opened shows are pretty fair bets, paying off with a high percentage of laughs at the expense of a few morally bankrupt characters. At Uptown Players is the Southwest premiere of Del Shores’ The Trials and Tribulations of…
A little bit of Walton’s Mountain, a sprinkling of Horton Foote, a dash of Tennessee Williams and you’re on Last Train to Nibroc, the first play in Arlene Hutton’s charming, evocative Nibroc Trilogy. Echo Theatre is presenting all three plays in rolling repertory this month at the Bath House Cultural…
In the beginning, there was the word. And it was the playwright’s. And the actors said the word. And the audience watched and heard the word. And if the word was good, the audience clapped and stood and felt justified for spending $60 a ticket and missing Larry King. So…
Violet Sherlock’s Last Case Plenty of musicals tell the story of an ugly girl yearning to be pretty. My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, The Apple Tree, Carnival, 110 in the Shade and most recently Shrek the Musical feature ugly ducklings longing for swanhood. How they get there usually requires the…
The top story in today’s Hollywood Reporter billboards the cast of the new Sci Fi Channel series Stargate Universe, third in the Stargate franchise. Starring opposite Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty, Trainspotting) is Brian J. Smith, a young actor we’ve been writing about (OK, gushing over) since he wowed critics…
The annual evening of folderol known as Broadway Our Way started out several years ago at Uptown Players as a tossed-together two-night fund-raiser with a cute twist. Performers from the company’s previous season’s shows would sing and dance, with the women taking on Broadway tunes written for men and the…
How do you freak out a serious stage actor? Ask him or her to do some improv. On video.That’s what we did with members of the new Dallas Theater Center resident acting company. After we conducted the serious interviews about being ack-tohrs in big-time regional theater, we made them act…
The next production at the Dallas Theater Center, In the Beginning (opening January 21), also marks the start of a new era for actors at the 50-year-old playhouse. It will be the first production to star all of the members of artistic director Kevin Moriarty’s new nine-member resident acting company:…
Death never takes a holiday in the plays of Martin McDonagh. It’s always right there in the room, or at least close by, lurking, stalking. He populates his scripts with nasty old ladies, drunken louts and bad-tempered cops—potential murderers all. Insanely funny conversations about trivial matters erupt into bitter confrontations…
In Dallas theater, 2008 was the year Jersey Boys jerked audiences to their feet at Fair Park, an all-drag Facts of Life became the must-see hit of the summer and William Ayers’ son, playwright Zayd Dohrn, premiered his 9/11 paranoia comedy, Sick, at Kitchen Dog Theater. It was the year…
As the Tina Fey of the 17th century, Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz wrote sly comedy that by all accounts cracked up audiences in the parlors and palaces of Mexican viceroys and Spanish nobility. Her works for the stage made light of then-popular cloak-and-dagger love triangles and boldly satirized…
What a shame that Ebenezer Scrooge didn’t have a gentleman’s gentleman like Jeeves at his side. Scrooge’s forced march to personal redemption might not have been necessary, and his earlier years would have been less wasted and considerably more fun. Jeeves’ employer, society gadabout Bertie Wooster, certainly seems to enjoy…
In a cage match, Crumpet the Elf could kick the cranberries off Ebenezer Scrooge and still have the energy to stomp Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Christmas Past. Don’t mess with Crumpet, the nom de Noel of writer David Sedaris. His mean and funny chronicle of time served as…
Ignorance, poverty, greed, forgiveness—the themes of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol are particularly relevant at this moment. What makes a classic a classic is that it has something to say to every generation, and though the annual production at Dallas Theater Center is almost identical to last year’s—including the return…
Seesawing between vicious satire and fawning tribute, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant offers a disarmingly funny lesson in the finer points of Dianetics. Directed by Jaime Castañeda and performed by eight cute kid actors at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, the show takes a mere 55 minutes and 11…
Just in time for the holiday season comes a play about a man having sex with a goat. Leave it to Kitchen Dog Theater, never ones for plum-pudding entertainment, to plop Edward Albee’s unnerving The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in our midst while everyone else is going with tinsel…
On November 4, Topdog/Underdog became a period piece. Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer winner about black brothers named Lincoln and Booth—their father’s idea of a joke and Parks’ method of foreshadowing their fate—is only 7 years old. But in our post-election Age of Re-Enlightenment, the play’s nihilistic view of the thwarted status…
A neon portrait of its composer-lyricist smiles down on Make Me a Song: The Music of William Finn, now playing in WaterTower Theatre’s studio space. Bald, bearded and over 50, Finn isn’t a pretty man in the flesh, much less in neon light, but he sure writes pretty tunes. In…
