Like many Broadway musicals these days, Hands on a Hardbody was adapted from a movie. But unlike others, it came not from a splashy animated feature but from an obscure 1997 documentary by S.R. Bindler about an endurance contest at a Longview truck dealership that awarded a lipstick-red Nissan to…

Good news: In the future, caftans make a comeback and toilet technology will be amazing. Bad news: Your house will know where you are and what you’re thinking at all times, the water will taste terrible and it will be too hot to ever go outside. In the world premiere…

Fake rain drips from the ceiling at the end of Thinner than Water, a dreary play by Melissa Ross, directed by Chris Carlos, now on in the smaller of two spaces at Kitchen Dog Theater. Really, the whole two-hour drama is a soggy slog through one family’s shriek-storms. Daddy’s dying…

Shakespeare Dallas’ fall production, Antony and Cleopatra, sports two sexy leads in Daniel Duque-Estrada (who’s also a company member at Dallas Theater Center) and the lush-voiced Joanna Schellenberg. As the Bard’s title characters, they create sizzling chemistry, obvious even from the back of the sprawling Samuell Grand Amphitheater. They speak…

Have you been shivering with antici … pation for a new Rocky Horror Show? That not only does the Time Warp but the Bristol Stomp, a Rockette kick line and maybe a little Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies, but with sequined 20-inch dildos? Dallas Theater Center has opened its season…

Unicorn, gryphon, bisexual man: Pick the one that’s real. The usual answer is “none of the above,” with the bisexual male lumped in alongside the Yeti, Easter Bunny and plus-sized supermodel as imaginary creatures. Yet Dallas playwright and director Bruce R. Coleman insists in his new comedy Mythical Beastie that…

Seeing a show at Lyric Stage isn’t just a chance to revisit a beloved piece of American musical theater; it’s an education in how musicals were done, and still can be done, on a grand scale. Lyric’s specialty, its sole focus, is reviving big American musicals, so the draw of…

It’s little wonder that no theater until Dallas’ Uptown Players has attempted the bio-musical The Boy from Oz in the decade since it closed its run on Broadway. Hugh Jackman won a Tony in that Broadway production, starring as its flamboyant title character, bisexual Australian singer-songwriter-showman Peter Allen. When Jackman’s…

Like an old actor no longer able to remember his lines, maybe the Festival of Independent Theatres needs to be led gently out of the spotlight for good. The annual FIT fest, as it’s redundantly known, was conceived 16 years ago to give small companies a chance to produce new…

The annual Festival of Independent Theatres is underway at the Bath House Cultural Center. Opening night featured two of the eight shows by companies too small to have their own permanent spaces. Instead of a dazzling launch for the four-weekend fest, however, the productions by PrismCo and Nouveau 47 were…

From the first line of Christhelmet, you know you’re in for something special in this gritty, great new musical written, directed by and starring Matthew Posey at his 40-seat Ochre House Theatre. “There’s gonna be a lot of feelings felt this summer,” warns Rosie (Dante Martinez), the jaded barkeep of…

Turns out the revolutionary way to stage Les Misérables is to take the French revolutionaries out of it entirely. No frilly shirts. No peasants waving big red flags. None of that ghastly marching-in-place every other Les Miz (or Les Mis, if you prefer) uses for clap-bait toward the end of…

One of the hallmarks of almost any production at Theatre Three, one of Dallas’ oldest theater companies, is how much time they waste moving furniture between scenes. So often the shifting of sagging sofas and rickety tables in and out of the in-the-round space seems unnecessary. T3’s penchant for choosing…

The Comedy of Errors at Trinity Shakespeare Festival in Fort Worth offers some of one and too much of the other. It’s a weak play by Shakespearean standards, a one-note farce that blows that same note over and over and over. Director Joel Ferrell tries to liven things up with…

Summer is Shakespeare season on both sides of the Trinity River. If you like soaking up your classical works in a steam bath with added sound effects from drag racers, police sirens and cicadas, head over to the grassy outdoor amphitheater at Samuell-Grand Park in East Dallas for productions by…

David Lindsay-Abaire’s two-act dramedy Good People at WaterTower Theatre argues both sides of the same argument. Are good choices or good luck the reason why some people succeed and others don’t? Struggling South Boston single mom Margie (marvelous Jessica Cavanagh), desperate for work, begs old high school boyfriend Mike (James…

Instead of producing the American premiere of British musical Soho Cinders, Uptown Players should’ve taken script and score and burned them. What a tawdry, creepy adaptation of Cinderella. If a musical could carry an STD, this one would come with a warning from the CDC. With music by George Stiles,…

This isn’t the maiden voyage for the musical Titanic at Lyric Stage. The company did it in 2003 using the same staging by director Drew Scott Harris and the same stripped-down set designed by Scott Osborne that merely suggests, with three levels of steps and metal railings, the gleaming decks,…

If you’d never seen a river portrayed on stage by actors holding long swaths of silky blue cloth, waving them up and down to make the “water” ripple, then the images evoked in The Magic Rainforest, An Amazon Journey would seem, well, magical. But unless you’re 8 — about minimum…

When a new play hits a stage in near-perfect form — like Matt Lyle’s Barbecue Apocalypse, the sizzling comedy headlining as a world premiere at Kitchen Dog Theater’s New Works Fest this month — it can look too easy. Dialogue crackles with originality; the plot veers off in unexpected directions…