That fat Christmas tree in the parlor is the first hint that things aren’t exactly kosher in the Levy/Freitag family. In Alfred Uhry’s light and likable play The Last Night of Ballyhoo, set in 1939 Atlanta, the Levys and Freitags celebrate the Nativity, hold Easter egg hunts and aren’t exactly…

We wear the chains we forge in life. Link by link their weight increases until at last the burden is so great it drags us down into the grave. As a Christmas message, this one is sort of “open vein, insert tinsel.” But it is the lesson taught in Charles…

Ear-bruising vocals and eye-stinging costumes are no strangers to Theatre Three. But with Glorious! this impecunious 45-year-old theater in the Quadrangle near downtown finally grabs hold of a show that demands those things. Talk about a perfect fit. In song and story, Glorious! tells of the silly, sad and very…

Revenge is for suckers,” says Henry Gondorff, Paul Newman’s character in The Sting. Among con artists the rule is you get stung, you move on. Don’t try to get even. Because if the grifter is good, you’ll end up getting taken all over again. That’s just about what happens to…

The title—Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story—sends chills all by itself. There’s a musical about America’s most infamous “thrill killers”? How could…? Why would…? It’s a grim affair all right, real musical theater noir. And Uptown Players’ production, the regional premiere of Thrill Me, doesn’t pretty up the proceedings…

No secret what Tennessee Williams might have been inhaling as he worked his chubby fingers over the typewriter keys creating The Gnädiges Fräulein. This bizarrely funny absurdist one-act, now on view in a production by WingSpan Theatre Company at the Bath House Cultural Center, burbles with doobie-doobie daffiness—like Waiting for…

Leave it to Tennessee Williams to pick the perfect name for a character in the throes of an emotional breakdown: Brick. Failed pro football player, miserable husband to the sexually pent-up Maggie, Brick Pollitt is a crumbling hulk of a man, one of three central figures afraid to face hard…

If ever a role called for heaps of bravura, it’s Don Quixote. Errant knight, madman, tilter at windmills, storyteller–Quixote is the blazing sun around which all elements revolve in Man of La Mancha, now playing at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Quixote must be a galvanic presence in this piece, someone the…

How far will a man go to win back his own soul? That question drives the drama of two new productions, Jubilee Theatre’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Lyric Stage’s Cabin in the Sky. Each tells the story of a troubled man who finds himself driven to the hinges…

With Paul Rudnick’s Valhalla, the Uptown Players plunge right into the sticky-sweet center of a gooey comic confection. This company specializes in gay-themed shows, and if this one were any gayer, Elton John could wear it, Tom Cruise could sue it and Liza Minnelli could marry it. Playwright Rudnick is…

She’s fat. No, really. But she’s OK with it. Just about as OK as any big girl can get in a thin-obsessed world. Question is, is he OK being the thin guy with the chubby chick? That’s the simple but strikingly profound premise of Fat Pig, a small play about…

The message of Women and Horses and a Shot Straight From the Bottle is, “Mamas, do let your babies grow up to be cowgirls.” The play by Los Angeles playwright Mary F. Casey is getting its world premiere production–and a strong one in most respects–at Echo Theatre at the Bath…

A great many angels may comfortably waltz on the head of a pin, but putting 20 actors and four musicians on the pint-sized stage at the Flower Mound Performing Arts Theatre for the musical City of Angels spells claustrophobia. How small is this place? Just 60 seats are jammed into…

Like Willy Loman, Classical Acting Company’s Death of a Salesman aspires to greatness and comes up well short of expectations. Arthur Miller’s 1949 drama is the heaving granddaddy of American tragedies. The play demands so much from its actors, designers and director that if anyone isn’t up to the task,…

Without actress Trista Wyly, the new show at the Pocket Sandwich Theatre would be just another ho-hum, pleasant little trifle. High art isn’t this venue’s specialty. Here it’s low-brow comedy and melodrama most of the year, with the audience invited to toss popcorn at hissing villains and to sing old-timey…

Funny what a hot day and cold booze will bring out in people. Some hard truths, for one thing. And in James McLure’s paired one-acts, Lone Star and Laundry and Bourbon, now playing for the second time in two years at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the combination of humidity and…

Perhaps the saddest aspect of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s autobiographical 1985 play about the first wave of AIDS deaths, is that it doesn’t feel like a museum piece. If only it did. Two and a half decades into the epidemic that has claimed millions of lives worldwide, Acquired Immune…

Once upon a time there were two musicals that began with the words “Once upon a time.” Into the Woods, now at WaterTower Theatre in Addison, and Brooklyn the Musical, on a national tour stop at the Music Hall at Fair Park, are tuneful fairy tales with twists (and shouts)…

Mamma Mia!, defying critical drubbings for half a decade, has been called a Twinkie of a musical. But that’s an insult to spongy Hostess snack cakes that have stood the test of time. Think of it as more of a theatrical baklava: layers of tissue-thin story line piled one atop…

What fools these mortals be. And what fun the revival of Randy Tallman and Steven Mackenroth’s rock comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Musical, now alternating through the summer with a more conventional Tempest at Shakespeare Dallas’ outdoor East Dallas venue. It’s been some 30 years since this version of…