The guys who are known as Romanovsky and Phillips are funny and freewheeling during their Sunday afternoon interview from New Mexico, but one question quickly corks their flow of irreverence and candor: “Is Romanovsky and Phillips still a duo romantically as well as professionally?” A throat clears and feet shuffle…
For Dallas theatergoers, the wait is over. We get to find out what happens between Joe and Louis, Pryor and the Angel, Belize and Roy, and poor wandering, hallucinating, but strangely lucid Harper. Dallas Theater Center stuck its neck out with a highly publicized, expensively promoted production of Tony Kushner’s…
thursday november 7 Desdemona…a play about a handkerchief: Last summer’s Shakespeare Festival of Dallas production of Othello, while competent enough, featured a performance by Liz Piazza Kelley as Desdemona that generally towed the line for generations of Desdemonas before her. While the character being innocent of Othello’s charges is what…
thursday october 31 Heaven: The Biblical Arts Center is smart–in a public relations sense–to call its latest children’s art show Heaven, although that title doesn’t cover the full range of subject matter here. A more complete label might be Heaven and Hell, because the exhibit contains illustrations by kids ages…
While it’s true that most filmmakers still keep on-screen gay romance in the hand-holding stage, the viewer who yearns to savor a little bit of tenderness between same-sex lovers may have been startled to find a wealth of sweet moments in the most unexpected places recently. Spike Lee, traditionally no…
Film critics are put in a difficult position when they see a movie that’s well-made but features characters so unbelievably odious you wouldn’t want to spend two minutes with them in real life. Of course, directors including Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese have built legendary careers out of one scumbag…
Ticket buyers who decide to attend the Undermain Theatre’s world premiere of John O’Keefe’s new play, The Deatherians, will see a sign at the door of the theater that states the following: “This play contains adult situations and extremely graphic language. For mature audiences only.” That warning is the understatement…
thursday october 24 Resuscitating the Virgin: Gretchen Swen and her nonprofit Extra Virgin Performance Theatre Cooperative enjoyed considerable success with their previous work, Sappho’s Symposium (not bad for a left-leaning political theater troupe in the buckle of the Bible Belt); but their venue troubles, as in not having a reliable…
For most of his 12-year career, director Spike Lee has shouldered a unique burden among young, contemporary black filmmakers. John Singleton, Albert and Allen Hughes, and Matty Rich earned their reputations with debut features that vividly explored inner-city crime. Spike Lee–whose earlier mainstream success arguably opened doors in lily-white Hollywood…
Cora Cardona, artistic director of Dallas’ sole seasonal Latino theater troupe, Teatro Dallas, has in the past expressed good-natured frustration about what she perceived as a clash of cultures between the traditions of Latino theater and the expectations of Anglo critics. It’s true that in recent memory neither the Observer…
thursday october 17 The Legalization of Marijuana: A political correctness not born of the American left has surrounded the debate over how to deal with drugs and drug addictions in our country. Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders got canned in part not for advocating the legalization of drugs, but for…
Some of us remember that there are really two Tom Hankses–Saint Tom and his Evil Twin. Saint Tom won back-to-back Oscars for his charming, bloodless performances in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He helped make Apollo 13 one of the most effortless entertainments of 1995, although he couldn’t quite smother the…
Long before movie special-effects wizards combined animatronic models and animation to make animals talk, the stage endowed our fellow mammals with a human voice–and more often than not, they criticized us. Shakespeare summoned an entire forest of quasihuman animals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to remind us that the mystery…
thursday october 10 Joan Osborne: The 1995 Joan Osborne single, “What If God Was One of Us?” was definitely one of the more intelligent songs to find its way onto alternative playlists in recent years, although heavy rotation, as is its wont, transformed a good thing into that I-can’t-stop-singing-it-to-myself phenomenon…
There are some who contend that Galt McDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado’s 1968 musical, Hair, nearly dealt a fatal blow to the American musical. Without the ascendancy of Stephen Sondheim and the emergence of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1970s, musicals would barely have scored a blip on the…
thursday october 3 Camping With Henry and Tom: In the spirit of Nicolas Roeg’s priceless script of Insignificance, which detailed a fictional conversation of the real-life hotel meeting between Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe, playwright Mark St. Germain wrote his comic exploration, Camping With Henry and Tom, in 1993, then…
Heterosexual Anglo moviegoers often find it difficult to understand why America’s various minority groups kick up a ruckus every now and then about the way they’re portrayed on movie screens. From Jesse Jackson’s protest outside this year’s Academy Awards ceremony to the recent condemnation of the action comedy Bulletproof from…
In the canon of angry white males produced by William Shakespeare, Hamlet is hardest to figure out. Richard III chokes on self-pity; Macbeth buries himself alive with ambition; Lear is felled by the family neglect born of his own megalomania. To identify exactly which of Hamlet’s peccadilloes finally undoes him…
thursday september 26 Hamlet: Kitchen Dog Theatre stirs up an autumn blast of theatrical introspection with its production of Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s most-produced tragedies. It’s also one of his least understood. This means that, unlike Romeo and Juliet or Othello–straightforward Shakespearean studies of human nature that should be mothballed…
The 1950s often are cited as this century’s watershed for American theater. It was then that Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, whose members worshiped at the altar of a Russian psychoanalytic guru named Stanislavsky, dominated Broadway and off-Broadway headlines with a method based on recalling real-life emotional moments and transferring them…
friday september 20 Wallace & Gromit: The Best of Aardman Animation: Packaged together into one feature-length program are nine award-winning shorts from the British-based Aardman Animations studio, recognized throughout the world for cartoons and commercials that mix the surreal and the slapstick. Every studio has had its classic duos, and…
No two films should be more dissimilar than Girls Town and The First Wives Club, which open this weekend in Dallas movie theaters. Girls Town spent most of 1996 as a hot indie flick on the festival circuit, its story of a trio of New Jersey high-school seniors who strike…
