Few shows are so overdone as this one. Critics dread reviewing it again and again. Ardent theatergoers greet its title on a new season brochure with groans of disappointment. Thinking Hello, Dolly! maybe? How about Tuesdays With Morrie? Either or both. They’re always playing somewhere, these two. And like theatrical…
In the second hour of Bent, two men carry rocks, one at a time, from one pile to another. When all of them are stacked, the same stones are hoisted again, placed back in the space so carefully emptied moments before. The repetitive action of men dressed in soiled striped…
Dining out with a vegan is like a date with Mr. Bean, the Rowan Atkinson character for whom things rarely go right. In our group of friends, it’s all about Mr. Green Bean, eschewer of meats and dairy products, chewer only of vegetables and grains and other edibles from sources…
A comedy about terminal illness? That’s the ticket at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas’ production of the late Scott McPherson’s 1991 play Marvin’s Room. An absurd, off-kilter tone is established in the opening scene. Middle-aged Bessie (Cindee Mayfield) sits in her doctor’s office, patiently watching her inept physician (Nye Cooper) chase…
By comparison, King Richard III makes Macbeth look like a pussycat. As Shakespeare’s worst/best sociopath, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, romps merrily through one of the Bard’s longest plays, killing everyone who stands, sits or squats between him and the throne of England. In a classical five-act production of Richard III,…
Trust Kitchen Dog Theater not to do anything ordinary with Shakespeare’s second-longest play. For starters, director Ian Leson (who’s usually a lead actor for this company) spent more than a year cutting the five-act script to watchable length (just over two hours). He’s done that by keeping all the murders…
Steven Walters’ latest new work for Second Thought Theatre combines high school football, violence, sexual abuse and the death penalty for two hours of tense drama. Call it “Friday Night Plights” as Coach Weldon Brown (Clay Yocum) brutally beats to death two of his star players in full view of…
Rooted in his signature bluesy folk-rock and branching out into all sorts of other forms, Greendale has become Neil Young’s musical kudzu. What started in 2003 as an “audio novel,” by Young’s description, already has been performed by Young on CD, DVD and in live concerts with his band Crazy…
All 103-year-olds should look as good as Major Barbara. There are lots of lines but few wrinkles in George Bernard Shaw’s three-act comedy, now running in a production full of smart young actors, and a few wise elders, at Fort Worth’s Stage West. Timely and timeless, the play asks still-relevant…
The latest out-of-town import to arrive at the Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys stage lets the audience see through walls. In Robert Hewett’s The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, actress Annalee Jefferies plays all seven characters. To transition from housewife (redhead) to gossipy neighbor (brunette) to alluring Russian…
The Unseen must be seen. Wedged into a ragged repertory of a dozen shows at WaterTower Theatre’s seventh annual Out of the Loop Festival, this 65-minute drama by Craig Wright occupies the small studio space only one more time on the fest’s closing weekend. It could and should reach a…
Pocket Sandwich Theatre gets no respect. The only for-profit theater in Dallas, the charming but grungy playhouse tucked into a corner of a two-story shopping strip on Mockingbird Lane has been pumping out low-budget entertainment for more than 25 years. They do popcorn-tossing melodramas and cheap-to-produce comedies. Actors, directors and designers…
Takes some nerve to open a restaurant in the westernmost flatlands of Frisco and call it BayGrill. It doesn’t even have a bay window, this bistro, much less proximity to a body of water. It is a pretty little place, however, sitting on the edge of oblivion at Legacy Drive…
Count on these things in most every Uptown Players production: cute guys kissing and at least one young man stripping down to scanty man-panties. There you have Uptown’s latest show, bare, a pop opera/peepshow about hot Catholic schoolboys in lust with each other. It’s a big, gay high school musical…
How sweet the sound of the other shoe dropping. All through Almost, Maine, the captivating comedy at WaterTower’s Studio Theatre in Addison, playwright John Cariani keeps gently postponing the payoff. In a series of 10-minute vignettes, couples fall in and out of love in rapid tumbles of unlikely pairings. They…
The fourth wall springs a leak in two shows now playing Dallas stages. At Risk Theater Initiative’s Slaughterhouse Five, a character resembling Kurt Vonnegut Jr., (played by T. A. Taylor) sits facing the audience to narrate his time-hopping memoir of World War II. In Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding, a Dallas…
From a chance remark overheard at a party, East Coast playwright Sarah Ruhl was inspired to create The Clean House, now playing at Fort Worth’s Stage West. It’s a gentle and oddly persuasive play—very funny too—about the relationship between women and dust, and about women’s ability to accept and forgive…
The First Lady of Song? How about Empress of All That Swings? Ella Fitzgerald comes to life again in the voice and “scat-itude” of Chicago actress E. Faye Butler. The glitzy production of the bio-musical, which arrives here from a sold-out run at Chi-town’s Northlight Theatre, is stacked with jazzy…
Like Ella, this one-woman biographical musical, directed by Phyllis Cicero, allows for lots of songs, interspersed with personal monologues about the men that got away. Dallas actress and cabaret diva M. Denise Lee may not look a lot like Billie Holiday, but she gets to the essence of the legendary…
Things just got a whole lot cooler around here. At two Dallas theaters, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday are back and ready to swing. Giving remarkably convincing performances as the late, great jazz icons in separate shows, E. Faye Butler is Lady Ella and M. Denise Lee is Lady Day…
Something terrible befalls the title character in Edmond just before David Mamet’s terse little play begins. It’s not important what that terrible thing is. Mamet, as is his way, never tells. Best guesses—that Edmond’s been fired from his big job on Wall Street, that he’s had a nervous breakdown, that…
My favorite dining companion put it this way: Urban Taco sounds like something you’d order from the J. Peterman catalog. He’s onto something. Think cute but functional. Trendy but not pushy. A little on the pricey side. But you want it anyway. Urban Taco fits all of those categories, and…
