How, you may ask, did 17th-century master satirist Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was the handle on his birth certificate) write with such incendiary insight on the vanity and frailty of human beings? You don’t have to read too far in his bio to figure it out: The guy was trained as…
thursday february 5 Charlie King: He may not have the household notoriety of Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, but singer-songwriter Charlie King has something even more impressive–their devoted fandom. Both have covered the songs of troubadour King, who for 35 years has crafted ballads and up-tempo tunes about contemporary issues…
thursday january 29 The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me: Critics of the gay and lesbian community often act as if there’s a monthly conference call among all North American homosexuals to update “the gay agenda.” Many community leaders probably wish political organization were that simple; one of the biggest complaints…
Tempting though it is, the stage critic will not leap into the fray of current presidential scandal to declare that Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, now being staged by Dallas Theater Center, is prophetic because it concerns a politician haunted by a misdeed he believed was long buried. The genius…
Richard Hamburger, Dallas Theater Center’s artistic director, has a taste for the perverse. Maybe that’s why he’s preparing to stage Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s claustrophobic drama about one tormented family’s day of bitter revelation, in the Arts District Theater, DTC’s gigantic downtown space. That’s roughly the artistic…
thursday january 22 An Evening With Gary Leva: It may not be Grauman’s Chinese Theater, but then again, Grauman’s Chinese Theater ain’t what it used to be either: The AMC Glen Lakes offered Dallas native turned indie filmmaker Gary Leva a stellar reception when his first flick, Plan B, wound…
A critic is always put in an awkward position when expressing dislike of any show playing at Kurt Kleinmann’s Pegasus Theatre, because the kind of broad comedy they specialize in succeeds or fails almost exclusively on the personal tastes of each audience member, not any objective appraisal of the material…
thursday january 15 Carl Gottlieb: Producer-director-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb has a wheelbarrow full of TV and film credits, but movie buffs will be forever grateful to him for writing the screenplay to Jaws, one of the greatest suspense movies ever made. That was when Steven Spielberg was a hungry, 27-year-old filmmaker,…
When you hear theater snobs hold forth on the civilized, specialized virtues of live performance, they often invoke that art form’s timelessness. Live performance, or at least some form of oratory before an attentive crowd, probably predates the advent of recorded history. Some form of it has appeared in virtually…
thursday january 8 Elvis’ 63rd Birthday: Why has “Calendar” included a mention of the late Elvis Presley’s birthday celebrations every year for the past several, only to use the opportunity to wipe our shoes on his revered but rather pungent hide? It’s easy to kick a man when he’s been…
According to playwright Lee Marans, Old Wicked Songs, his searingly funny Pulitzer Prize nominee from 1996, will be the second most produced play in regional American theater this season. Theatre Three snagged the script for its Southwestern premiere and has blessed us all with a magnificently paced, poetically performed production–and…
thursday january 1 New Year’s Day Psychic Fair: Forget New Year’s resolutions, those cynical promises we make to ourselves that are usually based on whom we think we should be, not on whom we really are. Why not find out what’s going to happen in 1998 and arrange your life…
It’s a tad early, not to mention uncouth, to name a Dallas stage award after myself. But since I procrastinate in all other areas of my life, I might as well be early naming, in my honor, a citation for excellence. Flouting Mark Twain’s aphorism that good breeding is merely…
Sitting in the cavernous, “temporary” Arts District Theater to watch Dallas Theater Center’s energetic but passionless A Christmas Carol, I couldn’t help looking around and noticing how much better dressed everyone else was than me. Of course, my friends would be quick to point out that even if I could…
thursday december 25 All-Star Christmas Invitational: We dedicate this Christmas edition of “Calendar” to you, the friendless orphan who’s faced with wandering the cold streets alone instead of being cooped up with family and friends you stopped liking long ago. In our minds, Christmas, more than any other holiday, is…
thursday december 18 Holiday on Vice: We’ve all heard the hilarious and haunting statistic that suicide crisis hot lines receive more calls this month than during any other time of the year. We’ve also heard that depression is anger turned inward, so, marrying the former fact with the latter hypothesis,…
Regular readers can now tell this whiny Scrooge of a stage critic that he finally got what he’s been bitching about for weeks–a new and decidedly nontraditional holiday play titled Greetings!. I must say that, as much as I enjoyed looking at it, I’m not sure what the hell to…
thursday december 11 La Virgen de Guadalupe Exhibition: She’s loved by millions in the Latino community; she can be seen in the back-window shrines of pickup trucks, and she’s made other people rich and famous off her image. Are we talking about Selena? No, it’s the Virgin of Guadalupe! The…
I hope that Quincy Long’s bracing, cheeky “children’s play” A Por Quinley Christmas is revived often over the next few generations, the way Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been for us. That will allow future, cyberspace theater critics to one day rail against it as toothless and overfamiliar the…
Bruce Coleman is seeking divine intervention. “We’re basically looking for an angel,” says the 36-year-old artistic director of New Theatre Company. “And if it sounds desperate, that’s because I am desperate.” Coleman has been feeling religious ever since he and New Theatre’s co-directors, Charlotte Akin Jorgensen and Jim Jorgensen, learned…
thursday december 4 Cara Mia Theatre Company: A general perception is that immigrant and first-generation Mexican-American women are acculturated to keep silent and endure whatever life hands them. Director Marisela Barrera and Cara Mia Theatre Company, a troupe of Latina artists, have put together a show that posits a cultural…
Legendary American standup Lenny Bruce became a legend not because he was flat-out funny. Listening to his recorded material today–from his famous “Lone Ranger” routine to his various tours through the ethnic hothouses of the urban landscape–reveals a rather glaring lack of imagination, especially when you compare what has survived…
