If she weren’t so stinkin’ crazy, Annie Wilkes would be a writer’s best friend. In Misery, the highly enjoyable stage play of the Stephen King novel now eliciting laughs and screams at Richardson Theatre Centre, Annie (played with slow-building furor by Rachael Lindley) cajoles and coddles the author whose books…

Mel Brooks’ The Producers is the gift that keeps on giving. First there’s the original 1968 film, a nearly perfect 88 minutes of comedy. Its two leads, Zero Mostel, as slimy Broadway impresario Max Bialystock, and Gene Wilder, as wobbly-kneed accountant Leo Bloom, never did better work. It’s not a…

Two women exist on strangely parallel planes in Lisa Loomer’s play Living Out, now onstage in an exciting and powerfully acted regional premiere at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. They are both working mothers with young children. Both have headstrong husbands who’d prefer that their wives stay home to be full-time mommies…

Neil Simon’s 31st play, The Dinner Party, now at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, skips the meal and serves up a big fat cream puff. It looks delicious, but bite in and there’s just the slightest hint of filling inside an empty shell. This two-act exercise is an airy and utterly…

Pick A Number as the best new short play about a provocative subject. The writing sends off sparks of genius, the plot twists shock. More happens in the scant 65 minutes of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s one-act gem, now onstage in a Southwest premiere at Undermain Theatre, than other plays…

Muscular young men rolling around on each other in skintight unitards sounds like a scene from one of the Uptown Players’ sellout shows. But the intensely though probably unintentionally (let’s hope) homoerotic drama The Wrestling Season is onstage at Dallas Children’s Theater, which is presenting Laurie Brooks’ gay-themed one-act as…

Mothers really take it in the aprons this week. In two new productions–the regional premiere of campy comedy Mambo Italiano at the Uptown Players and Quad C’s poignant The Beauty Queen of Leenane–they remember Mama not with flowers but with bouquets of blame. Mambo dances the tarantella on its two…

VaVa Veronica blows a mean saxophone. But not with her mouth. As one of a handful of ragged “disappointment players,” Veronica, a would-be strip woman played by voluptuous Lydia Mackay, bumps and grinds and warms up her mouthpiece behind the stage door of an old Dallas vaudeville palace, waiting to…

Andrea Dworkin is dead. Not a lot of laughs, Ms. Dworkin. She was the most radical of her generation of radical feminists. In lectures, articles and books–her first in the 1970s was titled Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality–Dworkin defined men as little more than moral cretins. She equated…

Professor Henry Higgins, the bossy, tweedy phonetics expert in My Fair Lady, boasts that he can tell any man’s place of birth and social class from listening to his accent. Tortured vowels? Low-born Cockney. Nasal consonants? Eton and Oxford. So what might the good professor make of the many attempts…

Something hideous hangs nailed to the door of the farmhouse in Kitchen Dog Theater’s sublimely terrifying production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. Old sock? Clump of moss? Hair? Oh, no… it couldn’t be what I think it is. They wouldn’t use that. Oh, yes, they would. Brrrrr. There are nasty…

On the face of actress Lynn Blackburn are all the reasons you need to see Hay Fever, Theatre Britain’s production now running–no, galloping at full gait–on the stage at Trinity River Arts Center. First, there’s Blackburn’s nose, a proud little thing twitching pertly like Samantha Stevens’ or turning down slightly…

The Cherry Torture, critics often call it. And for good reasons. Anton Chekhov’s final play babbles on and on for four acts of increasingly tedious arrivals and departures by more than a dozen oddball characters. Actors enter with great flourish to announce that they must be going, and then they…

Richard Greenberg asks a simple but intriguing question in his play The Violet Hour, now onstage at Dallas Theater Center. Given a peek into the future, would any of us take an existential do-over and alter the decisions we made early in life? Charles Dickens used the same device in…

Life is short and sweet, savor every minute. So says the message of The Living End, a quartet of charming yet provocative mini-musicals about life and death now on view at Lyric Stage in Irving. No, life stinks, according to the new Risk Theater Initiative show at the Bath House…

In the classic “actor’s nightmare,” you’re standing center stage in the spotlight. The audience stares, waiting for your next line. Behind you, costumed performers fidget, wondering why you haven’t picked up your cue. You have no idea what play you’re in, why you never rehearsed or what you’re supposed to…

Writing the little play about big ideas is playwright Lee Blessing’s specialty. He did it with A Walk in the Woods–one Russian diplomat, one American (both male) take a stroll and decide the future of nuclear arms–and he does it with Going to St. Ives, now playing in its local…

Forget, if you want to, that A Country Life is based on Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (originally subtitled Scenes From a Country Life). Chekhov is too tough to digest, so many long Russian names to swallow and heavy soliloquies to chew on for three or four acts. It’s better to…

Being terribly clever can make for terrible comedy. Freedomland, Amy Freed’s odd play about a family of brilliant eccentrics, spews clever lines 90 to nothing for more than two hours. “Sentimentality is a form of murderous aggression,” quips art critic Titus (Lee Trull), staring at a kitschy painting titled “Clowns…

The audience is 50 percent of the performance,” said the great old actress Shirley Booth. At least that much, I’d say. Maybe more. A good audience can inspire and ignite actors into giving the best performances of their lives. And a bad crowd can do just the opposite. Every actor…

Can Snoopy be due for a comeback? Back in the 1960s and ’70s, the black and white beagle and his pie-faced little pals from Charles M. Schulz’s cartoon strip Peanuts reigned as beloved pop-culture icons, up there with rock stars and astronauts. Even during the flower power years, more than…

Zombies do not deliver Christmas cheer. A small squad of the eerie undead stomp onstage to represent the Spirits of Christmases Yet to Come in Act 2 of Dallas Theater Center’s A Christmas Carol. They step-drag, step-drag in front of Ebenezer Scrooge (James Carpenter). Rising from the misty graveyard in…