After last fall’s sumptuously attired Gorey Stories at the Deep Ellum Center for the Arts, Our Endeavors partners Scott Osborne and Patti Kirkpatrick wanted to perform a similar feat — a smartly designed, stylized performance that would be suitable to its season but not tied down by one particular mood…
There are two scenes in One Flea Spare, the Southwest premiere of playwright Naomi Wallace’s pressure cooker of class and sexuality served up by Kitchen Dog Theater, that seem to be especially close to the heart of Adrian Hall, the show’s director and a nationally lauded stage visionary for more…
Since Dallas City Council enacted a ban on roosters last summer, the Oak Cliff Coffee House on Davis Street has become a shrine to the forbidden bird. Partly out of protest, partly from nostalgia, the cock has been made the caffeine hangout’s logo; the is bedecked with stuffed and illustrated…
About a month ago, the Dallas Theatre League held a meeting of theater reps from Theatre Three, Dallas Theater Center, Our Endeavors, Echo Theatre, and Lyric Stage, among others, and various media types, including yours truly and Tom Sime from The Dallas Morning News. Several topics were introduced and then…
At or soon after the start of the 20th century, the almost mythical George Bernard Shaw became a vegetarian; a socialist who believed property ownership amounted to public theft; a fervent (and minority) defender of Oscar Wilde during that playwright’s gory public dismantling; and a champion of working women who…
If you have read this space before, you know that I advocate theatergoing as a habit rather than as a secular, arts-patron version of the token-church-visit-every-Easter kind of attendance. While the best theater is more visceral than anything in a multiplex or on DVD, many folks are unprepared for that…
Let’s face it, folks. Circuses stink. Literally and figuratively. Clowns are unfunny and strident at best, and at worst, psychologically scarring previews for kids of humanity’s freakish existential dilemma (“Mommy, why can’t that man stop smiling? Why can’t he stop smiling, Mommy?!!!”). And watching lions and tigers forced to perform…
I’ve spent some long evenings in the theater recently, but rarely has the time sailed by as intelligently and harrowingly as it did in Inexpressible Island, a U.S. premiere courtesy of Dallas Theater Center. And we’re talking about a situation, however based in reality, that seems like a gimmick manufactured…
At this point, the chance of scoring a ticket to Don Juan in Chicago, the new show by Lean Theater in Theatre Three’s Theatre Too basement space, is about as likely as finding an unwrinkled sheet on Don Juan’s heart-shaped bed. Word of mouth has spread throughout Dallas theatergoing circles…
“Fuckin’ long life, ain’t it?” Two characters in two different scenes of Jim Cartwright’s Road express this sentiment, not so much with weariness but as bitterly humorous testimony to all the ways they must distract their senses to make it through another night. Alcohol remains the diversion of choice, to…
Fred Curchack is performing cunnilingus. In front of a live audience. Actually, DJ Pollochek, an obscure experimental theater artist, is going down on Serena, the veiled dancer at a sleazy subterranean strip joint called Club X. Both characters are being played by Curchack, a slightly less obscure experimental theater artist…
Valentine’s Day is really a day for love’s refugees — the single, the spurned, and those of us pining in that arid limbo between friendship and romance, with a who-knows-what-the-future-holds? dangling like a big, juicy carrot in front of us. With this holiday, we can sit back in our recliners,…
Theatre Three prides itself on being the Southwest’s most frequent showcase for the works of Stephen Sondheim since 1969. The program for their newest effort, the complex and obtuse Company, features a photo of Sondheim onstage with artistic director Jac Alder. When the now 70-year-old composer came to Dallas in…
Folks who spent part of their college years watching Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson every Friday and Saturday night on HBO, and then CBS, can easily become confused about whom they actually hung out with back then. In my addled memory, when a couple…
One of the late Charles Ludlam’s drag secrets was bird seed. Bird seed for breasts, that is. He discovered that, so long as you seal the pouches tightly, you were assured of mammaries that were pliant and shapely and shiftable, not unlike the real deal. People often accuse Ludlam of…
There was a recent Dallas Morning News profile of a long-term lesbian couple intending to fly off and get hitched in Vermont, which has become the first state to grant homosexuals almost the same marital rights as heterosexuals. Included in the story, somewhat obtrusively, were the war-hero status of one…
Gohan, the spiky-haired, monkey-tailed kid hero of Dragonball Z, has fallen asleep during his studies. He dreams he is being embraced by his long-lost father Goku, a tower of muscle with a geyser of brunette hair sticking straight out of his head. Parent and child stare into each other’s eyes…
Be Boyd, a recent transplant from North Carolina to the drama faculty of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, left the stage of Allied Theatre Group in tears at the close of Fires in the Mirror. Quite frankly, I’m surprised she didn’t have to be carried off on a stretcher,…
“If disenfranchisement is the father of rap,” says one performer in the gospel musical revue Travelin’ Shoes, “then meet its grandpappy — gospel music.” Certainly, you can find threads of black gospel in virtually every popular American musical form; rap and gospel are connected as part of the continuously evolving…
Here I sit, polishing this year’s Jimmy Awards and etching the names of actors, directors, designers, and productions in calligraphic script on the base plaques. Yet I can summon little enthusiasm for theater at the moment. It’s not because of theater itself, but because of the inevitable disruptions and dissipations…
Turtle Creek Chorale The Best of Turtle Creek Chorale (TCC Recordings) Over the years, I have been asked a few times to attend a Turtle Creek Chorale concert, and whenever I have declined, there has always been surprise. It’s like — “Hey, you’re gay, they’re gay. It’s a natural marriage…
“If God had meant us to think with our wombs, then why did he give us a brain?” You have to chew on that, one of playwright Clare Boothe Luce’s most famous quotes, for a while, and even then, you’re still not sure what you’re tasting. I interpret it as…
