Rarely have I been to a sold-out performance of a three-hour play where ticket-buyers, during intermission, laughed nervously about whether they had the fortitude to return. Mind you, I’ve been to three-hour shows where people fled during the break because the script or the performances were boring them silly or…
In two separate moments of release from the steamrollering epic plot turns of Dreamlandia, offered as the main-stage production of Dallas Theater Center’s Big D Festival of the Unexpected, onstage characters directly implicate audiences. They spot us, identify us, and accuse us. The first happens when a supposedly retarded young…
Many of the subjects of Dallas-based photographer Nic Nicosia seem to be funneling all their joy, sorrow, and paranoia into rituals whose significance is unclear but ominous. Nicosia uses friends, family, and professional models to fabricate an American suburbia that spurns the traditional scars of living for a wholly internalized…
Big D Festival of the Unexpected producer Melissa Cooper, who calls the official inclusion of small Dallas theaters this year “an experiment” (a successful one, let’s hope), has asked a pair of the city’s director-performers to do it Doggy-style…er, we mean Kitchen Dog Theater-style. The Dog is again trotting out…
A recent cover story in American Theatre discussed how the national network of prominent children’s theater in cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Louis, and Dallas was beginning to generate plays without “blue or pink plaid (and) fake furry animal costumes.” Issues of race, sexuality, and mortality had been introduced…
Dial the number of the Deep Ellum Center for the Arts, and a recording tells you it’s no longer a working line. Step into the cavernous Commerce Street space on an upcoming weekend night, though, and you will discover the center is still very valuable in its dying gasp. Between…
It’s easy to compound details and build an ominous “trend” for a whole scene, but one sad development I can confirm in this space: New Theatre Company, which since 1994 has produced some of the most disciplined and adventurous state, regional, and national premieres for Dallas audiences, is moving. Not…
With the rise of Latin Americans as formidable consumers and hotly pursued voters, the world premiere of former Dallas playwright Octavio Solis’ Dreamlandia couldn’t be more propitious. Solis’ map of the shifting fault lines between illusion and reality on the Texas-Mexico border, directed by Richard Hamburger, is the centerpiece of…
There appears to be quite a bit of flux in the Dallas theater scene now, with the ultimate destination for at least two companies still unknown. Right on the heels of the Theatre Three opening of Mizlansky/Zilinsky, or “Schmucks”, the regional premiere of a comedy by Jon Robin Baitz, a…
The thing that most annoys some people about Sandra Bernhard is what others worship in her. Namely, you never know when she’s being serious or sarcastic. A couple of years ago, when her latest one-woman show I’m Still Here…Damn It! was playing to sold-out crowds in New York City, she…
Pegasus Theatre ought to be aware that one of the most successful Dallas Theater Center shows of this current season was, for all practical purposes, a Pegasus production. Of course, departed director Jonathan Moscone brought in out-of-town actors and designers as well as professional multimedia folks to soup up the…
Folks who know John Waters only from his reputation as the film chronicler of the middle-class American id are always shocked when they see him in his less famous incarnation — as orator. He is polite, articulate, compassionate, even debonair, and lest you think this is some kind of elder-statesman…
There is an unsettling quality to the laughter — luckily, quite a bit of it — in the WaterTower Theatre’s regional premiere of Golf With Alan Shepard. Separation, the burden of memory, and the loneliness that too often descends on the aged are bound to rattle the nerves of anyone…
If time past and time future all point to the present, wrote T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets, then “all time is unredeemable.” World War II gathered like a flock of vultures as the great poet was scribbling this in England, but the idea that what we regret and what we…
Conrad Hall, who by his own account has been “gainfully employed” behind a film camera since he graduated from UCLA in 1949, is dreaming of his own paradise: a house with five acres of coconut trees on a lagoon some 600 yards from mainland Tahiti. Hall will return there shortly…
After some hectoring and pleading, the Dallas Observer got another crack at USA Film Festival coverage. And if we get our face slapped again, we just hope good intentions and honest impatience justify our impudence. Last year, as you may recall, the Festival chose to deny access to the Observer…
“The only things the United States has given the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails” is a quote attributed to the martyred Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. “And they make better cocktails in Cuba.” This assessment was made after a two-year stay in New York City, during which his most…
There are at least three people trying to ignore the truth in what has become a defining moment of their lives in Man of the Moment, the sometimes sad, sometimes acidic 1988 comedy by Alan Ayckbourn. The fact that this moment — a 17-year-old bank robbery thwarted by a meek…
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Inwood Theatre kicks off its spring World Cinema Matinee series with a masterpiece by German auteur Fritz Lang, who is most fondly remembered for that other masterpiece — the frenetic, angular Metropolis (1926), a movie that will live on as long as there are university film departments and experimental musical…
There is so much good will straining against the levees of Tomfoolery, a buttoned-down revue of satirical tunes by 72-year-old smartass Tom Lehrer, that you don’t mind when, midway through, it floods over the songwriter’s self-conscious cleverness and cuteness. Because, after a while, the charisma of three men and three…
Last October, when I was a guest on KERA 90.1’s The Glenn Mitchell Show discussing the 1999 Dallas Theater Critics Forum awards, a woman called in and bluntly asked, as per my solitary pan of Dallas Theater Center’s South Pacific, “What’s wrong with Jimmy Fowler’s mind?” Was this Richard Hamburger,…
