Cross the forlorn siblings in Chekhov’s Three Sisters with the squabbling kin in Arrested Development and you get a good idea what the family is like in Christopher Durang’s Tony-winning comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. It’s a brilliant, funny play getting a brilliant production at Uptown Players,…

Some characters in plays are people you’d like to know in real life. In The Motherfucker with the Hat, the five characters, with maybe one exception, you are happy to walk away from after 95 minutes. That’s how long Stephen Adly Guirgis’ profanity-spewing dark comedy lasts and that’s more than…

The basic question for Blue Roses is: Why? With a play as perfect as The Glass Menagerie, why mess with it at all? Why did anyone think turning it into a musical would work? Worse yet, why turn it into a bad musical, which is what’s playing at Irving’s Lyric…

Its title is the only bit of shock in Cock, the play by British writer Mike Bartlett now running as Second Thought Theatre’s 10th season opener at Bryant Hall. Oh, it’s all about the peen, where it goes and who wants it, but as a piece of contemporary drama, Cock…

Dallas Theater Center’s artistic director Kevin Moriarty loves big-budget visual gimmickry, but for Oedipus el Rey, playwright Luis Alfaro’s contemporary adaptation of the 2,500-year-old Greek myth, now running in the Studio Theatre at the Wyly, he’s held his usual instincts in check. Instead of tatting things up, Moriarty and his…

Tom Sawyer was quite the little pickup artist. “D’ya like dead rats?” he says to the new girl in town, Becky Thatcher. She doesn’t, but she does take a shine to Tom, America’s pre-Bart Simpson symbol of boyhood mischief. Be re-introduced to Tom and his dead-rat-and-dead-cat-swinging pals Huck Finn, Joe…

If the future of theater, in Dallas or anywhere else, has more shows coming up with the thrilling ideas, energy, talent and art of On the Eve, then we have a lot to look forward to. This time-hopping rock musical (with Irish step-dancing! puppet sheep! giant disco ball!) was born…

Here’s something that ought to happen more often between theaters on opposite sides of the Trinity: Fort Worth’s Stage West has imported the entire cast, and their puppet alter egos, of Theatre Too’s hit production of the musical Avenue Q. Back onstage again with their arms up the backsides of…

Make no mistake, there’s a big Boo Boo in this year’s Broadway Our Way, the upbeat annual musical comedy fundraiser put on by Uptown Players at Kalita Humphreys Theater. You’ll recognize Honey Boo Boo, the reality TV starlet, played for Uptown by the drag-mazing comic actor B.J. Cleveland. Out (s)he…

Here’s what I wrote about actor Brian J. Smith in 2002 when he was a 21-year-old student starring as Alex, head of the Droogs, in Collin College’s production of A Clockwork Orange: “His command of this difficult role is impressive and memorable. Smith, who grew up in Allen, has the…

It’s all there in black and white. For nearly 30 years Pegasus Theatre has been presenting Dallas writer-actor Kurt Kleinmann’s comedy take-offs on old B-movie murder mysteries and Hitchcock thrillers. The shows are presented in Kleinmann’s trademarked visual style that eliminates everything but shimmery shades of black, white and gray…

Ladies, take a bow. And another and another. This was your year on North Texas stages. Local actresses turned in a remarkable number of memorable performances in musicals, comedies and dramas in 2013. And it’s not every year that women get so many good roles in live theater in Dallas…

A theater critic character is murdered in the first act of Ken Ludwig’s comedy-mystery The Game’s Afoot (or Holmes for the Holidays). Meanwhile, in an aisle seat at WaterTower Theatre, an actual critic wishes for the sweet release of sudden death. The Game’s Afoot, surely the worst play on any…

Beneath the groaning puns, audience singalongs and glow-in-the-dark puppets, Theatre Britain’s annual Christmas “panto,” The Three Little Pigs, offers some cunningly subversive comedy. Good pantos always do. It’s taken 16 years for Theatre Britain, now based at the Cox Building Playhouse in Plano, to educate the audience about this style…

The harmonal balance is way off among the quartet of singers in One Thirty Productions’ Plaid Tidings, the holiday musical now doing matinees at the Bath House Cultural Center. But does it matter? This is writer Stuart Ross’ terrible sequel to his awful show Forever Plaid, which was about a…

All five people in Other Desert Cities, the 2011 Pulitzer finalist drama by Jon Robin Baitz, now at Theatre Three, talk to each other in a way only characters in grim, smug New York plays like this do. In complete sentences. Complete paragraphs. Using words like “hagiography” (which an actress…

Dead White Zombies’ latest, Bull Game, written and directed by Thomas Riccio, promises more than it delivers. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe not. Staged in a drafty warehouse in the new Trinity Groves hipsterhood west of the Trinity River, the show is an overstretched metaphor about the American obsession with…

Sweet as a bushel of sugar cookies, light as a snowflake, ‘Twas the Night before Christmas is safe family fare on the big stage at Dallas Children’s Theater. The play-with-music pretends to tell the back story of how 19th century American journalist Clement C. Moore came up with that poem,…

Enough with the feelgood shows of the season. Bring on the feel-bad entertainment! If you’re feelin’ Scrooge-y and would rather throttle Tiny Tim than sit through another Christmas Carol, here are five alternatives amid the blizzard of holiday fare. Race, Kitchen Dog Theater, through December 14. David Mamet’s tight little…

David Mamet writes great arguments. He is, arguably, the current American theater master at constructing conflict among smart characters driven by greed, anger or envy. Mamet’s best plays — Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, Speed-The-Plow — are built around tense back-and-forth verbal battles among vicious, ambitious, often desperate men. And…