God bless the children who attended the same Saturday matinee performance of The Yellow Boat that I did. During a question-and-answer session after the show, they demonstrated that you don’t just lose your innocence when you become an adult–if you’re not careful, you can also shed a certain clear, tough…
thursday march 13 Doris and Judy: Icons Among Us: In addition to co-founding Swollen Art Productions, actress-writer Dinah Lynch is a professor of theater at UTA who has played a number of strong, difficult women, among them Vita-Sackville West and Dorothy Parker. She offers Dallasites her full-length one-woman show about…
I must say that A Rose By Any Other Name, the 1997 season opener for Teatro Dallas, surprised me at regular intervals throughout its 90 minutes without intermission. There were enough changes in tone and texture–not to mention a rich performance by one of its stars that didn’t begin to…
thursday march 6 A Month of Dance: The next public offering from the Deep Ellum Opera Theatre demands a strong pair from each of its cast members–in this case, those are feet, not lungs. Nonvocal is the order for a month of weekend performances the DEOT has appropriately dubbed “A…
“Let me tell you a Dallas story,” says Jon Ginoli, lead singer and guitarist of the San Francisco-based trio Pansy Division. This follows a rather randy observation he called his “San Francisco story” that I promised not to print. “Right now, I’m dating a guy who moved out here from…
Since the blues is probably America’s greatest musical contribution to world culture, it’s not surprising that both African-American and Anglo-American artists have attempted to translate the genre’s quixotic vibe to arts both performing and static. We shouldn’t be surprised that so many such experiments have failed (including Toni Morrison’s weakest…
On a recent rainy Monday night, classical guitarist Carlo Pezzimenti performed for about 40 members of a college class taught by friend and fellow Brookhaven teacher Larry Gordon. Anyone who’s seen Pezzimenti perform knows what happened the instant his fingers hit the nylon strings: The Carlo hush fell over listeners…
thursday february 27 Sesame Street Live: Elmo may be the beloved imaginary buddy of millions of preschoolers across America, but his carcass is carpet if the parents of these youngsters who humiliated themselves during Christmas ’97 get a hold of him. You’ll find the fuzzy little weasel (or whatever he…
It’s refreshing to be reminded by the Undermain Theatre that Shakespeare wrote comedies, too. And that, slain in the right lunatic spirit, they’re damned funny in the least complicated way possible. Shakespeare’s plays continue to bear nutritious fruit, surprising when you consider that they are raided in and out of…
thursday february 20 Americans United For Separation of Church and State: You should know that Americans United For Separation of Church and State is not a bunch of godless pinko heathen, but a group of mainstream religious organizations like the National Council of the Churches of Christ, The Episcopal Church,…
In many ways, Sam Shepard’s rigorously honed dramedy True West is more evocative of the funhouse floor on which the author stands than any of his other plays. Perhaps the most purely comic of Shepard’s quartet of family safaris (Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child came first, A…
thursday february 13 True West: With its slowly tightening Mamet grip and a wealth of comic relief that becomes less of a relief as the play goes on, True West is Sam Shepard’s caustic reply to the myth of American male camaraderie on the frontier. The fact that the frontier…
Last year I did a phone interview with Scott Thompson, the openly gay co-star of The Larry Sanders Show and founding member of the defunct, much-lamented Kids in the Hall. We’d hooked up to discuss the Kids’ celluloid swan song, Brain Candy, but spent more time kvetching about the state…
Artistic director Bruce Coleman and his versatile New Theatre Company have just abandoned a semi-permanent home for a permanent one, alternating shows with Deep Ellum Opera Theatre at TOES (Theatre on Elm Street). Interest is burgeoning from corporate backers, and the company has added an extra performance to their weekly…
If Theatre Three’s comedies sometimes creak and lurch like a ship of fools set adrift, Norma Young and Jac Alder’s venerable Dallas theater-in-the-round has consistently demonstrated its wit and energy with musicals. You might’ve expected this standard to be compromised with 1995’s Lucky Stiff, a musical farce by Stephen Flaherty…
thursday february 6 SubUrbia: Among the pioneering crowd that includes Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Edward Burns, and Eric Shaefer, whippersnapper filmmaker Richard Linklater has proven himself the most diligent not just in developing his vision, but in spending more time behind the camera than in front of it yapping about…
With the release of Jane Campion’s confused Portrait of a Lady, all eyes are on the gay American novelist Henry James. In the world of popular cinema, which pits great literary artists against one another as if they were Hollywood players, James is called the next Jane Austen. Like Britain’s…
thursday january 30 The Dump Trucks: Don’t dismiss the two suicide-related art exhibits at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary as just macabre, artistic shock tactics. Between the philosophies of Dr. Kevorkian and the ever-rising rate of self-destruction among young people, suicide can be used as a prism from which to examine…
thursday january 23 Band-Dude Karaoke: The concept behind karaoke is that non-musicians–or at least non-professional musicians–are forced to display musical talents they may or may not have. What people never consider is that the whole setup of karaoke is so awkward as to render even the most experienced singer stranded…
Jean Cocteau, who died in 1963 at the age of 74, was the kind of artist almost nobody takes seriously anymore. Which is to say he was a man driven by the pure urge to create, rather than possessing a command of one particular medium. He wrote poetry, novels, and…
thursday january 16 Big D Festival of the Unexpected: As is the case every year at its Big D Festival of the Unexpected, the Dallas Theater Center gives mucho push to the national performers and playwrights who appear for the company’s grab-bag of cabaret, spoken word, comedy, performance art, and…
On one of the coldest nights this winter, I am led up a curving staircase that begins in the lobby of the Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys space. Near the top of the steps is the open door to Frank’s Place, a rehearsal space cum mini-theater named after the designer…
