Sometime in the not too distant future, human actors vanish from TV. Their replacements? “Actoids,” programmable talking dolls designed to populate midday soap operas and by-the-numbers nighttime cop dramas without the need for contracts, union wages, lunch breaks or even scripts. Just punch a button, yell “Action!” and their electronic…

Think of the Sycamore family as the Munsters. The clan at the center of the effervescent production of You Can’t Take It With You now onstage at the WaterTower Theatre is a kooky bunch of lovable misfits occupying a spooky old two-story in Morningside Heights. With its stuffed animal heads…

When real magic happens on a stage, as it does in Quad C Theatre’s current production of A Clockwork Orange, an audience may undergo something akin to alchemy. We sit down as our normal, numbed-out selves, a little work-weary, or logy from the bowl of teriyaki grabbed before curtain time…

The few pieces of furniture onstage in a couple of new productions–The Good Thief at Kitchen Dog Theater and Love Letters at the Stone Cottage in Addison–wouldn’t crowd a corner of the average den. Couple of chairs. Couple of tables. Glass of water. Glass of beer. The minimalism is intentional…

Many a marriage must feel exactly like Winnie’s predicament in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, now being forcefully and hilariously performed at Kitchen Dog Theater. There good wife Winnie (played by Shelley Tharp-Payton) stands in the first act, buried up to her waist in a mound of earth. Husband Willie (David…

Start with Steinbeck: “They had walked in single file down the path, and even in the open one stayed behind the other…The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features…Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large,…

After those first few piano notes sound as the lights come up on the panicked dancers of A Chorus Line, the audience should get hit with a full-on assault on the eardrums. As written, the opening song, “I Hope I Get It,” is a big blast of noise combining music,…

When a show begins with a funeral, watch out. A Class Act, a musical bio about troubled Broadway composer-lyricist Ed Kleban (now playing at Theatre Three), starts and ends at a fictional memorial service for Kleban at the Shubert Theatre in 1987 (his real memorial that year took place in…

Hip-hooray and bushels of ballyhoo for the wide-open exuberance of 42nd Street, a musical so slap-happy with tapping and dripping with schmaltz, you could get giddy from it. The spectacular touring production now at the Music Hall at Fair Park is naughty, gaudy, bawdy and brimming with talent. The chorines…

At a recent performance by the new ChelseaPark Productions troupe at the Trinity River Arts Center, the lights came up for intermission between two one-acts and half a dozen patrons headed for their cars. That effectively diminished the audience by a third. It’s a tough time to get a new…

The danger in writing a witty contemporary play filled with topical references and satirical jabs at public figures is that, over time, the references grow whiskers and the public figures fade into obscurity. That’s what’s happened with George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1939 comedy The Man Who Came to…

Done wrong, a tribute show like Always…Patsy Cline could come off like one of those hokey “legends” revues packing ’em in on the main drag in Branson, Missouri. But done right, as Addison’s WaterTower Theatre is doing it now, this oversimplified country-music bio can become a classy homage to one…

If bad acting were a federal crime, Tony Curtis would be locked up in Leavenworth. In the much-ballyhooed, hooey-filled Some Like It Hot, now finishing its run at the Dallas Summer Musicals at Fair Park, Curtis does it all. Which is to say, he can’t do any of it. Can’t…

Every woman knows a “Mr. Love.” He’s the too-handsome roué who dabs too much Aramis on his neck and darts his eyes at his reflection in every shiny surface. In Karoline Leach’s 1995 play The Mysterious Mr. Love, now onstage at the Trinity River Arts Center, the title character carries…

Nobody dozes off during Blast! Several times during the high-concept marching-band event now playing at the Fair Park Music Hall, the blare of dozens of horns and the pounding of a hundred drums large and small get so loud you can feel your bones vibrating. At top volume, the noise…

Maybe we ought to rethink this outdoor Shakespeare thing. It was 40 years ago this summer that Public Theatre founder Joseph Papp moved his New York Shakespeare Festival into the just-built, open-air Delacorte Theatre in Central Park and made watching the works of the Bard a must-do event for Manhattan…

Just about everything in The Wizard of Oz at the Dallas Summer Musicals at Fair Park is like it is in the great old MGM movie we know so well. Dorothy skips down the yellow brick road in a blue gingham pinafore. Glinda the Good Witch floats into Munchkinland on…

Small-town life gets a brutal but hilarious going-over in Sordid Lives, Del Hughes’ comedy playing at the Trinity River Arts Center. Make that small-town Texas life. The kind of small Texas town where men have big bellies, women have big hair and everybody has a big mouth. This is the…

In only 70 minutes, Barbette, the new play from Kitchen Dog Theater, achieves what too few other stage works ever do: It makes art. That it manages to make art happen so quietly and with so much heart is a special, precious gift to its audience. Based on the life…

Farewell, fourth wall. Actors are talking directly to their audiences in three shows, each of which tries to dissolve the invisible barrier between performer and spectator in a different way. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the in-your-face approach just gets annoying. Such is the case with Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days,…

Only a darned good writer could turn the subject of methamphetamine addiction into a spirited comedy romp. The Abandoned Reservoir, now onstage at the Bath House Cultural Center, is evidence that Stuart Litchfield was such a writer. It’s a shame he’s not around to hear the laughter and applause. Litchfield,…

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” wrote T.S. Eliot. For 1930s poet Laura Riding, that meant stealing not rhymes but husbands, notably Schuyler Jackson, a rather shiftless sometime writer for Time magazine who was married to a plain New England farm girl named Kit. Charismatic, ego-driven Riding was the companion…