There are only so many Cratchits and Nutcrackers and flock-watching shepherds a person can stomach this time of year. It’s nice to see theaters offering alternatives to the traditional tinsel-dripping holiday hooha. Opening over the next couple of weeks: Theatre Britain’s lighthearted “panto” version of Snow White at Trinity River…

They’re packing ’em in over at Teatro Dallas for the touring production of Making Porn, a lurid little comedy about the gay porn industry that stars one of its bigger, um, talents. That would be Matthew Rush, a puffy-lipped he-man with arms that hang like chuck roasts from his massive…

Tom Stoppard is a tough sell to the typical theatergoer. And by typical I mean a real die-hard fan of live performance who pays to see several plays a year. Most people don’t go to the theater. Ever. Just like most people don’t eat fried calf brains or read Doris…

The story goes that when Oscar Wilde traveled to America in 1881, he was asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare. “Only my genius,” he replied. The Irish-born poet, novelist and playwright was the Victorian era’s most quotable aesthete, famously spouting barbed aphorisms even to his…

Let’s do the time warp again and again and again. The Rocky Horror Show returns, this time at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, where the rip-roaring, raunchy fun starts well before the first glimpse of that “sweet transsexual,” Dr. Frank ‘N’ Furter (played by Paul Taylor as a cross-dressing cross between…

What is it about the blues that makes feeling bad feel so good? Two new productions are singing the blues in different ways–one musically, one satirically–but there’s something immensely satisfying for the theatergoer in both. It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues, the nostalgic revue that just opened the new season…

Now this is a party. Uptown Players close out their third season with an orgy of writhing bods and steamy hook-ups in a production of Andrew Lippa’s Jazz Age musical The Wild Party. It has it all in terms of R-rated box-office appeal: nudity, boy-boy kissing (what would this theater…

We need Atticus Finch. Dedicated, decent, a scholar and father, Finch is the main adult character in Harper Lee’s perfect 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. He’s a good man, this lawyer Finch, thoughtful, fair, loving and just. Whether from our adolescent acquaintance with him from a high school reading…

Angus can’t remember anything for five minutes. Or three minutes. Or two. He has a steel plate in his head from a war injury. His short-term memory is shot. He can count the stars in the night sky in one glance and add columns of numbers in a trice, but…

Smoke and poetry thicken the air in Anna in the Tropics, now onstage in an intensely passionate production at Dallas Theater Center. Set in a cigar factory outside Tampa in 1929, Nilo Cruz’s two-act play, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer for best new drama, unfolds like a hazy, sexy dream…

As midlife crises go, Marjorie Taub’s is a monster. In agony over the death of her therapist, Marjorie, the main character in Charles Busch’s comedy The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, is first seen by the audience at Theatre Three deep in menopausal malaise, wailing and whimpering like a wounded…

Flapping and honking like geese in a yard, the six female characters in Steel Magnolias are exaggerated versions of pushy Southern women as seen through the eyes of a gay man, playwright Robert Harling. For Love! Valour! Compassion!, gay playwright Terrence McNally gathers eight stereotypes of artsy, East Coast-y homosexual…

Skid Row never looked so clean. Every ugly, filthy, creepy, scary detail of the original film it was based on has been scrubbed away in the oversized touring production of Little Shop of Horrors now going through its motions at the Music Hall at Fair Park. This version of the…

“The American theater’s in a shitload of trouble,” the “stage manager” says to the audience in Anton in Show Business, Jane Martin’s roundhouse punch at the absurdity of the acting profession. That may be true, but the funny thing is, by choosing this dark, smart satire as its season opener,…

You’ll come for the title. You’ll stay for 70 minutes. And you’ll go home thinking of punch lines infinitely funnier than the ones coming from the stage in Porn for Puritans, the comedy revue now playing in the little theater at The MAC. Written and performed by Leigh Tomlinson and…

Sometimes a few orders of well-made appetizers can be as satisfying as a four-course meal. So it is with The Dining Room, now playing at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas. A.R. Gurney’s two-act play offers nibbles of story, several tasty characters and enough good lines to chew on to forgive the…

The first words the audience hears in the Richardson Theatre Centre production of the thriller Wait Until Dark come from President Gerald R. Ford, grimly granting Richard M. Nixon a full pardon for involvement in Watergate crimes. It’s a brief audio flashback to 1974, a dark period in American history,…

Hardly anyone writes love letters anymore. Sigh. Real billets-doux, the kind penned in inky swirls on creamy paper, have given way to the crude shorthand of instant messages and the tinny squawk of disembodied voicemail. Try wrapping a satin ribbon around those. Back in the dark ages, B.AOL., as it…

Questions about art, race, ethics and language spark passionate arguments in the provocative new play Permanent Collection, currently the main-stage offering at Kitchen Dog Theater’s sixth annual New Works Festival. In an elegantly designed and smartly acted production directed by Dan Day, the Thomas Gibbons drama challenges its characters (and…

Cocktail hour extends to nearly three in WaterTower Theatre’s bouncy, boozy production of Company. The Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical finds a group of five upscale married couples gathering for the 35th birthday of bachelor Bobby (Donald Fowler), a 1970s Manhattan playboy with an aversion to settling down. Everybody sings, and…

It’s hard not to like a show that raffles off chess pies at intermission. Pump Boys and Dinettes, now playing at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, is its own big sticky slice of American pie. A Broadway hit with its original cast of songwriter-performers in the early 1980s, the revue featuring…

Marie Jones’ 1999 Irish comedy Stones in His Pockets, the final production of Theatre Three’s current subscription season, turns out to be this theater’s best in many a moon. About time, too. This company has limped through the past year with a lineup of plays that were ill-chosen (Arsenic and…