The end of a movie marks the start of Annie Baker’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Flick, now on in a fastidiously directed and beautifully acted regional premiere at Undermain Theatre. The movie is The Naked and the Dead, a 1958 Raoul Walsh action film whose soundtrack throbs with the…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Lots of people write plays. Not many get plays produced and put on a stage for audiences to see. Dallas playwright Jonathan Norton has been getting his plays out of his head, onto the page…
So much attention to detail goes into every show that Pegasus Theatre does in its trademarked “Living Black and White” style. Presented as a vintage piece of silver screen silliness come to life, the plays written by and starring Pegasus founder Kurt Kleinmann strip all the color from everything on…
This was the year DFW’s favorite theater kids grew up. No longer newcomers on local stages — as actors, playwrights or companies — they did big things in big ways in 2014. Here’s a look back (and a glance ahead). Please hold your applause till the end. If you watched…
A series of 10 short plays dubbed A Very Nouveau Holiday is on for a few more performances at the Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park, and it’s a little naughty, a little nice. The collection is hit-and-miss, ranging from mawkishly bad to absurdly smart, but the actors — Ginger…
If you have soured on The Nutcracker or are humbugged by too many Christmas Carols, pull into The Great American Trailer Park Christmas Musical, now onstage at WaterTower Theatre in Addison. It’s a hot mug of sassy-crass tea, two hours of low comedy with a high-caliber cast. Christmas season has…
Theatre Britain’s annual British “panto” fairytale at the Cox Playhouse in Plano is always a holiday treat. This year Beauty & the Beast, not the talking furniture Disney musical, but a campier comedy by Jackie Mellor-Guin, uses all the traditional gimmicks we now know to expect. Kiddies will latch onto…
Settle in for a long winter’s nap at A Civil War Christmas at Theatre Three. It’s a mournful 150-minute drama with music, all public domain stuff (“Silent Night,” “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” and even “The Yellow Rose of Texas”). Author Paula Vogel won a Pulitzer Prize for How…
The latest production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by Dallas Theater Center at the Wyly Theatre will make you forget ghosts of Carols past. DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty has adapted the familiar story his way, with pointed political commentary about the plight of the poor and a noticeable…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. “I tend to play wacked-out characters, but there’s no reason I couldn’t play doctors and lawyers.” Actor Van Quattro, a favorite among DFW theater directors and critics, is frustrated. He’s been auditioning for a lot…
The new Elevator Series in the sixth-floor performance space at the Wyly Theatre allows plenty of space for the dancers to run in NICE, the fascinating new piece by Dallas choreographer Danielle Georgiou and her company, DGDG. “It’s nice to be nice,” croons singer-pianist Paul Slavens, who composed the score…
Tasty baked goods, glowing ovens, scary beasts, flying witches and dark forests. This is the stuff of classic children’s fairy tales. Throw in 6-inch stiletto heels, push-up bras and glossy lips, and it’s also the stuff of The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, a toothsome play by Meg Miroshnik about…
What if you knew the truth but refused to believe it, even if denial meant certain death? Kitchen Dog Theater’s latest production, the regional premiere of Swiss playwright Max Frisch’s prescient 1958 absurdist comedy The Arsonists, sparks a low flame under that question and lets it sizzle for a couple…
Unfasten your seatbelts. There are no bumps on this ride. Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, that quaint morsel, is on at Dallas Theater Center. That’s because this fall Dallas Theater Center is doing big things with old shows no one has been clamoring to see again. Consider this: For its…
Ochre House’s latest oddity is a new light sci-fi drama written and directed by company member Kevin Grammer. Flower in the Machine takes its time — about an hour too much, frankly — to show what happens when romance withers in a world overrun by technology. Elizabeth Evans plays Girl,…
A Hit and a Myth
for Golden AppleLyric Stage has polished up another forgotten gem of American musical theater. And what a gleaming beauty it is. The Golden Apple retells The Iliad and The Odyssey in grand comic operatic style, its characters plunked down in 1910 in a small town on Mt. Olympus in Washington. Lyric’s sparkling…
Theater companies and arts critics around Dallas have declared recent SMU drama grad Jeffrey Colangelo a budding genius as a playwright, director and fight choreographer. He’s certainly a genius at one thing: convincing people he’s brilliant with shows that are both boring and baffling in their lack of originality. His…
Hardly matters anymore if a musical is a hit or a flop on Broadway. Big regional companies like Addison’s WaterTower Theatre are so starved for new shows they’ll grab rights to anything that played a week or two in New York, as long as there are roles for hot young…
When a play and the performances in it are as stirring as Jubilee Theatre’s The Brothers Size, it’s hard to find the right descriptives to do it justice. “Compelling” is too overused by critics. “Awesome,” too trite. Just know that the words of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and the work…
At Dallas Children’s Theater, Rapunzel! Rapunzel! A Very Hairy Fairy Tale, directed by Nancy Schaeffer, is letting the title character’s hair down while bringing the house down with giggles of delighted young audiences. This is children’s theater at its best, cast with top professional grown-ups — Erika Larsen as the…
Director Michael Serrecchia has gathered some mighty big voices to play Little Women in the musical version of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas ends its season with this show. On a multi-level set by Rodney Dobbs that has the cast navigating steps made of giant stacks of…
Tennessee Williams described The Two-Character Play as his “most beautiful” drama after A Streetcar Named Desire. He may have been a bit too in love with his own words. It’s a haunting piece laced with poetry, madness and tragedy, but it’s no Streetcar. The current production of The Two-Character Play…
