The staging of Booth, the world premiere drama by Dallas actor-writer-director Steven Walters at his Second Thought Theatre, is small. Just 60 seats in Bryant Hall. The main acting space is about 12-feet-by-12 of wooden planks. But the scope of this historical tragedy is huge, covering events leading up to…

It’s not the end of the world if your dinner party is a bust. Or is it? In the smart new comedy Barbecue Apocalypse by Matt Lyle, a big city husband and wife struggle with adulthood. “We are in our 30s and have movie posters thumb-tacked to the walls!” wails…

Remember how the election of Barack Obama was supposed to define the era of “post-racial” America? That lasted about a minute. Then out they came, the ravening racists. Liberated at last, they no longer felt constrained about expressing their abhorrent views in public. That includes those in public office. Remember…

No actor in a five-state area says “Go fuck yourself!” better than Dallas actor Terry Vandivort says it in Nicky Silver’s The Lyons, now playing at Uptown Players at Kalita Humphreys Theater. Vandivort plays Ben Lyons, an angry old cuss who knows he’s dying. From his Manhattan hospital bed, he…

Who’s your favorite Sherlock Holmes? Sexy-arrogant Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC’s fast-paced modern-day version of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories? Muscular Robert Downey Jr. in the action-packed big-budget feature films? The most elegantly droll was British actor Jeremy Brett in the long-running series on PBS years ago. The facial profile…

There’s a functional way to drag a corpse off a stage and there’s a funny way. The young actors in Fun House Theatre and Film’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead do it the funny way. Every time. Fun House, for theatergoers who haven’t yet discovered its extraordinary shows, is Jeff…

It was a mistake to put a clock on the wall of the set for Gidion’s Knot, the two-character Johnna Adams one-act now running at Kitchen Dog Theater. Set in a schoolroom, the play unfolds in real time, though you’d swear it warps and slows down somewhere in the middle…

Hipster, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies, it’s time to slip your orbs toward one Lord Buckley. He was a regal cat-daddy, an original, a performer of jazz-infused stand-up drawn from the scribblings of master scribes. Ochre House theater’s own in-house hipster Matthew Posey has penned a new play, and directed it,…

A small show that deserves a bigger audience than it’s getting is Soul of Sam: The Sam Cooke Story, now on at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. Written and directed by Sheran Keyton for her Fort Worth-based DVA Productions, it tells the life story of the 1950s-’60s singer/songwriter known…

Nocturne begins and ends with death and speaks of little else in between. Don’t let that put you off. The play by Adam Rapp, now running at Second Thought Theatre, announces its mordant theme in the first line uttered by the only character who speaks for nearly two hours. He…

A transvestite, an Oscar nominee, a football team, a mother who kills her kids and some Jane Austen. Dallas Theater Center’s 2014-’15 season has all of those, plus Scrooge and a play about a book club called, what else, The Book Club Play. No big family-oriented show, however, unless that’s…

Dallas Theater Center is just hours away from releasing its official announcement of its 2014-’15 season, but we already know this: No Dracula, no Shakespeare…

For my money, Miss Great Plains was robbed. At each performance of Pageant: The Musical, on now at Uptown Players at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, the same six contestants vie to be named Miss Glamouresse. The winner is picked by a panel of judges selected from the audience. Opening night…

Dallas Children’s Theater has a charming, heartwarming family comedy in Mariachi Girl. A Latina fifth-grader named “Cita” (Aisha San Roman, in her 20s and a bit curvy to play a 10-year-old) idolizes her dad (David Lugo), a Mexican-born carpenter who moonlights as the leader of a mariachi band. She begs…

Seeing a play at Theatre Three is like going to Sunday dinner at the home of an elderly relative. When the old girl feels sharp, she’ll whip up a hot homemade meal with all the trimmings. When she’s having one of her “spells,” you might sit down to a plate…

Dallas Theater Center will produce nine shows next season (up from seven this season), five of them back at DTC’s original home, Kalita Humphreys Theater on Turtle Creek. That may be good news to theatergoers who prefer the free parking at Kalita and the more bottom-friendly seats at the 55-year-old…

All through The Fortress of Solitude, the huge new musical playing now at Dallas Theater Center (co-produced with New York’s Public Theater), we wait for that magical moment. Musicals need that moment. The good ones all have them. Eliza Doolittle’s “rain in Spain” linguistic breakthrough in My Fair Lady. The…

For a decade cabaret star Jim Caruso has been lighting up Mondays, traditionally Broadway’s performance-free “dark night,” with his late-night Cast Party. It’s a star-studded open mike at Manhattan’s Birdland nightclub, a time for stars to try out new material and unknowns to try to be discovered. Liza Minnelli likes…

The spring theater season begins with WaterTower Theatre’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, which isn’t a “fringe festival” at all but a juried collection of plays, solo performances, dance and music on three stages. This year’s event, running through March 23 (and co-sponsored by the Dallas Observer), features 19…