What started four years ago as a one-night-only fundraiser for the upstart Uptown Players has evolved into such a sell-out event that they now stretch Broadway Our Way over two weekends. This year’s edition, subtitled Divas Unleashed, is a ferociously fun celebration of the theater’s previous season that invites cast…
In the beginning, Children of Eden looks like it might have a prayer. What else would you expect from a show that stars God? Adam, Eve and their kids make an appearance. Noah and his bunch come with herds of animals played by adorable young’uns with paper plates and Dixie…
Christmas may come but once a year, but Clive and Belinda hope to do so several times–and under the tree, no less–in Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s bitter farce, Season’s Greetings. In the sparkly, punch-drunk production on view at Collin County Community College’s Quad C Theatre, these two characters–dishy single novelist Clive…
Boys will be girls in the British “panto” tradition, carried on again this holiday season by Theatre Britain in their intentionally over-the-top and utterly delightful production of Jack and the Beanstalk. The Brits do love putting actors in women’s wear. In panto (short for pantomime, though the silent aspects of…
“There is no amendment against same-sex comedy,” warns comic actor Paul J. Williams in his introduction to another performance by Queertown, the seven-member comedy troupe that commands the stage at the West End Comedy Theatre. They’re gay, all right, this bunch of giddies. It’s just that not all of them…
They talk, we listen. Stripped down to basics, that’s live theater. And in two new productions–the warm and funny Visiting Mr. Green at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas and the eerily prescient Humpty Dumpty at Second Thought Theatre (relocated to Addison)–the actors do the talking part so well that we in…
Give us a T! Give us an A! A little of both are on display in Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical, now shaking its pompons and some booty at Kitchen Dog Theater. Based on the infamous smut film from the late ’70s, but only very loosely, this is porn to…
Oprah Winfrey needed to prove the depth and breadth of Sir Anthony Hopkins’ talent. So the other day on her show she asked the Oscar-winning actor to read aloud from the Chicago Yellow Pages. He played right along, declaiming with great flourish: “Professional Nail Care! Women and men! Two dollars…
Miracles abound in Crowns at Dallas Theater Center and Handler at Quad C Theatre in Plano, two shows that explore faith, love and redemption. DTC’s cast of seasoned Equity professionals (including two local favorites) gets into the old-time religion with foot-stomping renditions of gospel tunes and broadly acted stories about…
Because of the wonderful things she does, Stephanie J. Block makes Wicked a magical ride. Same goes for Kendra Kassebaum, David Garrison, Carol Kane, Paul Slade Smith, Jenna Leigh Green, Logan Lipton, Derrick Williams and the rest of the marvelous cast of Munchkins and winged monkeys in the musical prequel-sequel…
Tommy, we can’t hear you. And it’s a shame. He still plays a mean pinball, that deaf, dumb and blind kid, but once he snaps out of his self-induced catatonic state, the young pinball wizard can’t make any points with the accursed acoustical problems in the Uptown Players’ production of…
Actors are animals. That’s the theme of this week’s hayride, which takes us to a happy barnyard and a dreary backstage rat’s nest. Over at Dallas Children’s Theater, they’re doing Charlotte’s Web, with a charming cast donning the fur and feathers of all who populate the farm in E.B. White’s…
In its opening scene, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Wonder of the World threatens to be just another sitcom-on-a-stage. But it doesn’t take long for Second Thought Theatre’s sharply directed and snappily acted production to get up to frantic speed. By scene two it’s clear that nothing will be the least bit predictable…
Months of therapy are all it will take to come to grips with Tracy Letts’ dark and funny Bug, onstage now in its area premiere at Kitchen Dog Theater. It’s that disturbing, that real. And as a piece of live theater, that much of a visceral shock to the system…
The real test of any play written as a star vehicle is how it works when performed by lesser mortals. Two productions that have just opened–Theatre Britain’s Lettice & Lovage and Theatre Three’s The Imaginary Invalid–feature so-so scripts that could benefit from more commanding personalities in the leading roles. Peter…
Home to many a forgettable, popcorn-tossing, low-comedy melodrama, Pocket Sandwich Theatre now owns bragging rights to something pretty cool: the premiere of the first professional production written and directed by Brent Black. At 21, the kid from Irving is still a year away from his drama degree at the University…
The first person we see in Contemporary Theatre of Dallas’ explosively funny production of Beth Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest is Carnelle, the leading character played by Jennifer Knight, practicing her patriotic tap routine for a Fourth of July beauty and talent pageant she desperately wants to win. “Boom!” she…
How do you make a dead baby float? Two scoops ice cream, two scoops dead baby. Old joke. Terrible joke. But there it is, coming out of the mouth of Ben Marcus, the expectant father at the center of Little Footsteps, now onstage at the Black Box Theatre at the…
If only Zach could see Southern Baptist Sissies, now running at Uptown Players. All summer dozens of online blogs have bounced stories and comments back and forth about Zach, a 16-year-old Tennessee boy whose own Web journal details his fears of being dispatched by his parents to Love in Action,…
The hot tomato juicing up the new comedy Pico de Gallo: The Return of the Queen is one “Chula Cholula,” a spicy little slice of womanhood who just happens to be played by a man, Oscar Contreras. Chula is a favorite recurring character in shows written and performed by the…
They’re naked and wet at Theatre Three, where the in-the-round stage becomes a burbling swimming pool for the production of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. Based on myths set down by Ovid in A.D. 1, the play revisits the stories of Phaeton, Halcyon, Poseidon, Orpheus, Midas and other figures invented by the…
What must go on offstage at Disney’s On the Record? Eight singers and nine musicians populate this sickeningly cheerful revue of more than 60 songs plucked from 75 years of movies from the mouse factory. Now playing at the Music Hall at Fair Park, the touring production already has crisscrossed…
