David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley belong to a select group–playwrights who have had their work interpreted by chick singers with only one name (Madonna in Mamet’s case, Cher in Shanley’s). This highly significant factoid has not been lost on the 11th Street Theatre Project, which has cannily combined a…
What happened to Stephen Wade should happen to everyone. The young Chicagoan was having a perfectly average early ’60s American childhood until the night he saw the Beatles on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” From that point forward, the Creepy Crawlers set began to gather loam in the closet as Wade…
Imagine for a moment that the good citizens of Austin have Dallas surrounded and are lobbing mortar shells into the streets, gang-raping women, and “cleansing” the Metroplex of its men. Now imagine that you are a playwright who wishes to comment on these events, but in order to reach the…
Editor’s note: Beginning this week, P.B. Miller, a longtime Dallas Observer contributor, takes over our regular Stage column. Nora FitzGerald, our previous columnist, has relocated to the Washington, D.C. area. Before she passed, Eurydice-like, from these pages, Nora FitzGerald asked me to visit several area theaters she had been unable…
Though Anthony Burgess deplored what he saw as modern society’s mechanization of men’s souls, he was a bit of a machine himself. During his allotted three score and 10, Burgess manufactured more than 30 novels, multiple volumes of literary criticism, and hundreds of essays, yet still found time to play…
Russian writers get a bad rap. Far from being suicide and samovar-obsessed weird-beards, they are actually rather jolly fellows. Examples? you ask. Well, take Dostoevsky and that funny scene in Crime and Punishment where Razumikhin cracks the old lady’s skull open with an axe and “the blood gushed as from…
“His Majesty,” Oscar Wilde purrs to an expectant King Edward VII, “is like a warm stream of bat’s piss. So strong in his sentiments and flowing in his expression.” Monty Python fans will no doubt remember this (paraphrased) line from the classic sketch in which Wilde, Shaw, and other celebrated…
There are, of course, two Dallases. There’s slick, soulless, sprawling, sterile Dallas, the one that all right-thinking boulevardiers disdain. And then there’s quirky, progressive, funky, interesting, artistic Dallas, its wee heart beating like a field mouse in its hole, which is all the more cherished by the cognoscenti (you and…
Editor’s note: Nora FitzGerald, Dallas Observer’s stage columnist, is on maternity leave. Longtime Observer contributor P.B. Miller is filling in during her absence. Theatrical comedy is a tough sell these days–not that it was ever easy. Finding an audience for comedic theater is even harder now, though, because there’s a…
