There are deeper issues behind the identity of pseudonymous playwright Jane Martin, a Kentuckian who remains the most-produced playwright in the 25-year history of the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays. Women who’ve been accused (and vehemently deny that they are Martin) include established theater artists…
Given the number of people lining up to humiliate themselves on shows such as Temptation Island and Chains of Love, you’d think the connection between fame and shame is a new-millennium phenom. But New Yorkers Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman have been making a scary public spectacle out of themselves…
“I see myself writing in the tradition of Shakespeare and Moliere,” playwright Don Evans once told The New York Times. “I’m very much aware I come from a street tradition, but my work came about because of writers I love, like William Shakespeare.” I’m pleased to report that one of…
It was sometime around 1977, Southern soul singer Millie Jackson recalls, when she realized she had “a reputation that preceded me.” “I was booked to appear on The Merv Griffin Show, and everybody was runnin’ around lookin’ scared,” she remembers. “I came on to sing Merle Haggard’s ‘If You’re Not…
As you read this, a 38-year-old Merchant Ivory production called Shakespeare Wallah, about a troupe of English actors traveling through India, is playing to capacity houses at a Left Bank movie theater in Paris. This is not because some film scholar or rep house booker is hosting a festival of…
A meeting of the Dallas Observer minds found us arriving at a happy–and unusual–consensus: Yes, there’s some good stuff playing at the 31st Annual USA Film Festival, but the programming is eclipsed by the people being imported for after-screening Q&As. We’re not talking a Cannes-like cavalcade of A-list names. No…
A co-worker who regularly attends the theater fairly recoiled when he learned that Dallas Theater Center had programmed Margaret Edson’s Wit into the final slot of the season. He had seen the New York production, and while he could note some of its admirable qualities from a safe distance, he…
Playwright Diana Son, who contributed some of the best material to last season’s TV show The West Wing, is a woman who wears her hair very short and eschews makeup. In interviews, the Korean-American writer talks about having been mistaken for a man at various times in her adult life,…
For 14 years now, die-hard patrons of the annual Dallas Video Festival have set themselves up for heartbreak. If I attend the documentary about left-handed gay Soviet filmmakers, I miss the experimental piece that guy in New York did with his cat and various hand-sewn costumes. By choosing Barbara Hammer,…
One prominent stage director in town confessed to me that he found Blood Bondage, the quasi-evangelical vampire saga that marked ProgreXssive Arts’ first full production last year, perversely enthralling and funny. Any show that climaxes with a battle between an evil mentor bloodsucker with an English accent and a charismatic…
Playwright-novelist-children’s author-film director Phillip Ridley is one of those multi-hyphenated artists who believe that the message transcends the medium or, plainly put, that a compelling story is paramount in every field in which he works. He does more than just “dabble” in all these professions. He understands that the tools…
Like most institutions that seek to divert children, Dallas Children’s Theatre is serious about mixing entertainment and edification. Surely one reason parents purchase theater tickets is to counterbalance the perceived sugary sleaze of American pop culture with exposure to “finer things” like the stage. But like most of its peers,…
It’s inevitable that Theatre Three’s production of Art would be greeted with high expectations by those of us who saw the December 1999 touring production that Dallas Summer Musicals brought to the Majestic Theatre. With its sometimes vicious wit and uncomfortably recognizable close-up of the inequalities and manipulations of three…
A few years back, when Edward Albee spoke at the Dallas Museum of Art, he set aside a very special few minutes to heap vitriol on the profession of theater criticism and those wannabe artists who flail away with ink-stained claws at the accomplishments of others. His sentiments were hardly…
“Do you know what a wild bird’s tongue looks like?” a caged Evie (Sue Birch) asks her despairing and restless daughter Maxine (Susan Sergeant). Evie’s describing a secret trauma that I won’t reveal in this review. “Black, flattened, moving splinters. And the sounds they make with tongues like that. Horrible.”…
Writer-director Mike Judge doesn’t sound nearly as much like Hank Hill, the character he created and has voiced for 100 episodes of Fox’s King of the Hill, as you want him to. But when discussing his TV habits, the Austin resident does slide into an enthusiastic technical description of his…
I haven’t been too keen on Dallas Theater Center artistic director Richard Hamburger’s leviathan takes on musicals (although anything performed in that aircraft hangar known as the Arts District Theater has got to be stretched to fit), but I’ve adored his similar outsized approach to classical works. Memories of Hamburger’s…
Over my five years-plus stint as a theater critic in this town, actor after actor has told me that after the experience of directing themselves in a play, they’d never do it again. (Having seen some of the results of this overburdening of theatrical responsibilities, I have been tempted to…
What passes for “reality” under the great video eye of network television is pretty lame these days. Personally, we’re not going to take that prefab national phenom known as Survivor seriously until someone dies of exposure, snakebite, or hunger during the show. Similarly, we’ll consider Temptation Island “reality-based programming” only…
Imagine my surprise when I took a seat inside Fort Worth’s Sage & Silo Theatre for a revival of Bent, Martin Sherman’s pioneering if now somewhat quaint 1979 drama about the Nazi persecution of gay men, and watched as a nationally known porn star strolled on-stage. The program insert didn’t…
In a chat between the two acts of the brand-new musical Fat Freddy’s, Rudy Eastman defused the notion that such bawdy, rollicking material is guaranteed to graze on sold-out houses and fatten his company through the rest of a more adventurous season. The artistic director of Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre–who…
The afternoon service at Sparkman Hillcrest Funeral Home started off subdued and solemn, appropriate for anyone recently deceased–except the woman being buried this day. The folks at this public gathering on February 22 to mourn the premature passing of Priscilla Davis were pretty much what one would expect: women with…
