When all elements come together, a night at the theater can be as refreshing as a three-day weekend. In WaterTower Theatre’s production of the Rupert Holmes musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the cast is first-rate and the technical aspects are nearly flawless. Holmes’ book and music offer a cleverly…

Harold Pinter scares people. His plays can be obtuse, his characters off-putting and brittle. He likes to juggle time, tossing conversations around in a scene so that some characters occupy one plane of reality, while others exist somewhere else. He writes in choppy, stream-of-consciousness riffs. And then there are the…

As escapist entertainment, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes hits all the right notes. Within its two hours of slap-happiness are heard some of American musical theater’s wittiest, loveliest tunes: “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Friendship,” “You’re the Top,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “All Through the Night,” “Blow Gabriel Blow,” “Easy to…

Setting a play at a high school reunion is a risky choice. Most people dread reunions. Like weddings and funerals, those two other overused plot gimmicks, the real thing is bad enough. Why sit through one where you don’t even know the participants? In The Pavilion, now onstage in its…

Times being what they are, one line in Act 2 of the play Transatlantic Liaison is guaranteed to goose the audience to attention. “What a thankless people, the French,” growls Chicago author Nelson Algren to his paramour, French Existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir. On opening night at Theatre Three, where…

Plays by Rebecca Gilman should come with a warning label: “As seen in Ladies Home Journal.” Gilman constructs heavy, overwritten dramas, including Boy Gets Girl, now onstage in Echo Theatre’s production at the Bath House Cultural Center, and Spinning into Butter, done last season at Theatre Three, around some mushy…

Some actors really throw themselves into their roles. Throughout the 90-minute drama Big Love, now playing at Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District Theater, the six leading actors physically throw themselves hither and thither across a half-acre of open stage. They sprint, leap, twirl, waltz, cartwheel, windmill, swoon and slam themselves…

Collectively, giant squid now outweigh the entire human population. Got that from a report in Weekly World News, the most reliable of sources about all such phenomena, particularly breaking stories regarding squid, octopi, nautiluses and the misunderstood cuttlefish. According to the “world-renowned” scientists quoted by Weekly World News, global warming…

Two plays, one question: What does it mean when members of an ethnic group practice intolerance toward their own? In Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo, now onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the Freitags and Levys, a noisy family of non-observant Jews in 1939 Atlanta, don’t take kindly…

Everybody sings up a storm in Dreamgirls, the nostalgic backstage musical about a stormy Motown girl group torn asunder by ambition and clashing personalities. In the nifty staging by Dallas’ TFM Productions at the Trinity River Arts Center, everybody in the large cast sings great, which is a huge relief…

This is a glowing review for a play about plutonium. For three hours in Michael Frayn’s fact-based Copenhagen, nearly perfect in the impressive production at Theatre Three, two brilliant World War II-era scientists discuss the splitting of the atom and the scary prospects of nuclear Armageddon. They talk quantum ethics,…

Though The Laramie Project recounts some scant details of his life and the awful facts of his death, Matthew Shepard himself is never depicted in the three-hour theatrical docudrama now onstage in its area premiere at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. That Shepard’s absence is the point clearly serves as motivation for…

If comedy is tragedy plus time, then 150 years from now, The Complete History of America (abridged) might be hailed as a comic masterpiece. As it is now, however, the show’s two hours of skits, song parodies and adolescent silliness, written by the same trio of author-actors who condensed all…

As light and crisp as the bubbles in a Buck’s Fizz, the dialogue in Oscar Wilde’s infrequently performed comedy-melodrama Lady Windermere’s Fan stands as some of the playwright’s best. “I don’t know what society’s coming to,” moans a snooty duchess, “the most dreadful people seem to go everywhere. They certainly…

Hello, Godmudda. Hello, fodder for a Pocket Sandwich Theatre comedy whose jokes are so bad one suspects the script was dropped at the front door wrapped around a rotting halibut. Fredo Corleone wasn’t as dumb as The Godmudda–A Mafia Fairy Tale, which tries to blend the Cinderella story with a…

Dallas theater turned out some cruel and freaky work in 2002. In A Clockwork Orange at Quad C Theatre, gangs of cranked-up teens executed beautifully choreographed “ultra-violence.” In Barbette at Kitchen Dog Theater, a Texas-born transvestite committed suicide hanging from a trapeze. In Side Show at Theatre Three, pretty conjoined…

Before writer David Sedaris became America’s favorite chain-smoking, gay ex-patriot raconteur, he worked one memorable holiday season as “Crumpet the elf” at Macy’s on 34th Street in Manhattan. It was a scary-weird job, as Sedaris revealed in a wicked radio essay he performed a decade ago on National Public Radio’s…

Cross Noises Off with Waiting for Guffman and you get Inspecting Carol, Daniel Sullivan’s two-act comedy now playing to well-deserved laughs at Plano Repertory Theatre. This backstage farce about a struggling theater company’s disastrous production of the Dickens Christmas classic builds to a loud, slap-happy conclusion and serves as a…

Only the hardest of humbug hearts could resist the high-gloss charm of Dallas Theater Center’s A Christmas Carol, now onstage at the Arts District Theater. It’s a riotous, expensive-looking rendition of the Charles Dickens classic, crowded with pretty dancing wenches and adorable urchins wassailing around fir trees under garlands of…

Ethelred the Unready is ready for his close-up. Shakespeare got a lot of mileage out of the feuds and foibles of many crowned heads in British history, mainly your sequentially numbered Richards and Henrys. But until Silence, the comedy by Brit playwright Moira Buffini that’s been held over for a…

A good deal of rogering goes on in Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill’s dark farce about sexual identity that’s now getting a first-class production by Echo Theatre at the Bath House Cultural Center. Rogering is British slang for you-know-what. Boffing. Having it off. All that nahsty nudge-wink, nudge-wink bedroom nonsense. In…

A lousy daddy, that King Lear. A real crumb bum. Through five long acts of Shakespeare’s finest play, Lear nastily foments family squabbles, property disputes, madness, war, murder and suicide. He destroys his entire family and leaves his kingdom in ruins. Only at the end of his ego-driven life does…