The fewer people onstage in Theatre Three’s heavily populated Hot Mikado, the more fun the show. A 1986 adaptation by David H. Bell and Rob Bowman of an even older jazz version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, this one is directed and designed with an emphasis on frenetic movement…

The woman we meet in Irish-born writer Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary is no ethereal virgin. She’s a pissed-off mother of a wayward son, tired of the “misfits” who followed him around, angry that 20 years after his death she’s a prisoner of apostles who just want her to…

Agatha Christie’s 1943 whodunit And Then There Were None is packing them in at Plano’s Cox Building Playhouse. Audiences love a well-done mystery and this one, creaky as it is, and so repetitive in its three acts that you might wish the murderer would kill faster, is sufficiently entertaining…

“I am sick to death of cleverness,” says the character Jack Worthing in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. “Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few…

How much you’ll enjoy Dallas Theater Center’s production of Molière’s The School for Wives might depend upon your tolerance for rhyming dialogue. Can you stand an evening of rhyming couplets without the urge to throwy uplet? It’s a quaint old thing, this 353-year-old French comedy about one man’s desire to…

Unrequited love, that hard right to the heart, that sharp cut to the gut, has inspired two good new solo shows by local actor-writers Van Quattro and Brad McEntire. Quattro’s Standing 8 Count and McEntire’s Cyrano A-Go-Go were audience faves on the opening weekend of the 14th annual Out of…

CORRECTION: Jeff Beckman, director of corporate communications for The Hershey Co., sent us a letter telling us our statements about the differences between the recipes between Hershey’s version and the British imported version of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk were incorrect. We’ve appended his letter to the bottom of this story. And…

At a brisk 55 minutes, Mike Bartlett’s four-character one-act Bull is just the right length. A minute more and the heightened tension in this piece might cause spontaneous human combustion. It’s that hot, that fierce. And that good. Second Thought Theatre’s production of the brutish British drama, directed by Christie…

Kinky Boots, now playing at Music Hall at Fair Park, is a size 6 show in a size 13 production. What a minor piece of musical theater, blown up and spread out on a big stage. And what a major disappointment for a show that won Tony Awards in 2013…

Count on actor-writer-director-puppeteer and Ochre House regular Justin Locklear to bring his unique brand of weirdness to Doom McCoy and the Death Nugget, his original student-acted production (from an idea by Thomas Riccio) now at UTD’s University Theatre…

For his new play Mississippi Goddamn, Dallas playwright Jonathan Norton does something unexpected and a bit radical in his look back at the 1960s civil rights movement. Instead of simply lionizing Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary who worked to overturn Jim Crow laws and was assassinated on his own…

This year Dallas theaters are in love with Shakespeare’s suicidal teenagers. Get ready for half a dozen productions of Romeo and Juliet, including big ones at Shakespeare Dallas and Dallas Theater Center. Plano’s Fun House Theatre and Film is doing a small one, but it’s lovely, with heartfelt performances by…

Cast away all doubts about Gilligan’s Fire Island, the latest comedy bamboozlement (with bamboo) from playwright Jamie Morris, who hasn’t met a classic TV sitcom he didn’t want to turn into an R-rated, cray-cray gay romp. Uptown Players’ laugh-till-you-wheeze production is awash with silliness on the Rose Room stage in…

Dallas actors Wendy Welch and Bob Hess struggle to make laughs happen as they ham their way through the one-act two-hander Sexy Laundry by Canadian playwright Michele Riml, now on in a production directed broadly by Terry Martin in WaterTower Theatre’s studio in Addison. Even these talented pros, so funny…

Putting the audience on couches sounds like a swell idea. Upholstered seating would seem to be a welcome alternative to those stiff green meanies you have to sit on in the main space at the Wyly Theatre. The chairs in the upstairs venues in that building are designed to remind…

On his 60th birthday, astronomy professor Ansel Barber sits on his roof, staring through a telescope at the heavens. One by one, his family and friends crawl out a dormer window and bring him down to earth for a night of dark revelry and confrontation in the new musical Soft…

After five years of development, with workshops here and in New York City, Will Power’s musical Stagger Lee finally has its world premiere at Dallas Theater Center. With all that time and effort behind it, Power, who is DTC’s Mellon Foundation-funded playwright-in-residence and the Meadows Prize resident writer at SMU’s…

Drinks and sexist attitudes fly in The Explorers Club, the protofeminist farce now playing in a chortle-worthy production at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Nell Benjamin’s 2013 play is set in 1879 Victorian London in the polished and paneled saloon of a poncy men’s club whose starchy members fancy themselves scientists and…

Suspend any expectation that the actor playing Truman Capote in the one-man play Tru, now on at Theatre Three, will attempt an impression of the author as accurate as the late Philip Seymour Hoffman did in his Oscar-winning performance in Capote…

Let’s do some basic forensics on how a thing as wretched as The Book Club Play got produced at the Dallas Theater Center. DTC is our big League of Resident Theatres professional showplace with a large staff dedicated to bringing top quality scripts, new and old, to audiences. There have…