thursday may 15 Harry Wu: A lot of American political leaders, both Republican and Democrat, wish that Harry Wu would just shut up. Scheduled as the keynote speaker for the upcoming Congressional hearings on whether China’s “most favored nation” status should be renewed, the 19-year gulag veteran, courageous activist, and…
Laurel Hoitsma, a company member of Undermain Theatre and actress about town, called a couple weeks ago to make a request unusual to these ears: “Please don’t review the new show I’m in.” Had I finally bored a Dallas actor to the breaking point? After being reassured that this disinvitation…
For several years now, Clebo Rainey has been called “poet emeritus of Dallas” or “the father of Dallas poetry” or–most recently in these pages–“the Papa Bear of North Texas poetry.” From hosting poetry nights at Club Clearview, the Dark Room, and the McKinney Avenue Contemporary to organizing virtually every reading…
thursday may 8 James Kelman and Duncan McLean: Booker Prize-winning novelist James Kelman earned all kinds of comparisons to James Joyce–not all of them favorable–when his brutal, poetic novel How Late it Was, How Late stormed the world’s literary salons in 1994. His dogged pursuit of the perfect Scottish dialect…
At this writing, I’ve seen two performances of the Undermain production of writer-director Erik Ehn’s The Sound and the Fury–a Wednesday preview and last Saturday’s opening night. I must admit I didn’t start to enjoy the show until I’d kicked it around in my head during the interval. This made…
When I first saw Dalton James, he was eating the entrails of a dead baby. It was July 1996. The Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park played host to the Open Stage production of New York playwright Nicky Silver’s Fat Men in Skirts, the first and possibly best of three Silver…
thursday may 1 Shoppers’ Guide to the Center of the Universe: The 18-year-old Dallas-based modern dance troupe Dancers Unlimited mounts an ambitious new production that springs from the mind-meld of artistic director Lori Darley, composer Frank Lacey, and writer Tom Blackwood. Still, don’t confuse “ambitious” with “self-important”; while the contemporary…
The young heroine of The Holy Inquiry, a United States premiere presented by Teatro Dallas, makes two mistakes early on in the play–she learns how to read, and she saves a Jesuit priest from drowning in the river after his canoe capsizes. These may not sound like screw-ups, but for…
thursday april 24 Edward James Olmos: His well-publicized personal troubles with a certain angry ex-wife and a rogue gun aside, Edward James Olmos claims that his life would be just hunky-dory if he chose not to speak out against gang activity in nationwide tours. As it happens, Olmos insists that…
“Other people had hits with her songs” was the sentence just beneath the headline in USA Today that announced musician Laura Nyro had died. She succumbed to ovarian cancer at the age of 49. This was the most depressingly predictable of epitaphs for Nyro, whose flirtation with media celebrity flared…
What, the cynical historian might ask, can a play written in 413 B.C. say about the 1997 us? Whatever it tells us–and if you pay close attention to the text, placarded with disciplined but unaffected readings in the Gryphon Players’ new mounting of Euripides’ Electra, you’ll find much that’s familiar–you…
The USA Film Festival follows Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival in Park Cities, Utah, by about three months. If you were to rank the importance of the USA Festival against Sundance among industry types and star-gazers, that distance would seem more like three million light years. And yet, as evidenced at…
You won’t find a better paradigm for the polarities of opinion about British director Peter Greenaway than in Love and Hisses, a collection of picks and pans written by members of the National Society of Film Critics. Reviews of the filmmaker’s 1990 scatological comedy The Cook, The Thief, His Wife,…
If there’s one rule to staging Sam Shepard’s wildly eccentric plays, it’s that the cast must have a sense of humor. The poetry in Shepard’s enormous canon (45 plays, among which are 11 Obie winners) has hoodwinked more than a few actors and directors into taking Shepard, as crazy as…
thursday april 17 A Tribute to Margo Jones: Arts & Letters Live continues its 1996-’97 season with a two-part tribute to a Dallas woman whose impact on national theater is profound. It would be enough to say Margo Jones nurtured the early careers of Tennessee Williams and William Inge, but…
thursday april 10 Homerun: Whether she’s channeling Chippy the West Texas hooker or negotiating with an armed bandit who breaks into her gynecologist’s office while she’s in mid-exam, Jo Harvey Allen is what we like to think of as the consummate Texan–individual, unflappable, and able to converse with animal, vegetable,…
Scarcely have I felt two conflicting emotions so intensely as during All’s Well That Ends Well, the finale of Dallas Theater Center’s 1996-’97 season. I was soothed and startled, delighted and disturbed by the tension between this crisp, stately staging by Richard Hamburger and the acidic sentiments of Shakespeare’s 1602…
thursday april 3 Mary Williford-Shade and Jose Bustamante: Nationally acclaimed dancer Mary Williford-Shade has earned something of a reputation as an angst queen with her ferocious, frenetic style of dance. She teams with Jose Bustamante, a University of Texas at Austin dance faculty member who has choreographed in both Spain…
Only recently have I been able to articulate why the stage musical so often encounters a “Keep Out” sign on the door of my heart. I’m an essentially sentimental person who can coo over empty packages when they’re wrapped in original style, which is precisely what Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner…
thursday march 27 All’s Well That Ends Well: The Dallas Theater Center closes its 1996-’97 season with a whisper rather than a bang; one of Shakespeare’s more nuanced sex-role comedies with a heroine that makes Titania look like Edith Bunker. Strong-willed Helen chases a man who has sworn his antipathy…
When my eyes landed on the definition of “arabesque” in Webster’s Dictionary, a thought hit me with the force of a quick, hard wedgie: I’m a fraud. I was researching to write this review of one program in Deep Ellum Opera Theatre’s March series, A Month of Dance. Webster’s was…
thursday march 20 The Rainbow Poets: The Writer’s Garret, in cooperation with the Dallas Poets Community, presents an evening of lyrical male bonding as part of its “Soup’s On” series. Football and fart jokes are being dispensed with; communication rituals practiced by the species homo attitudis are in the spotlight…
