In 1997, former Dallas Observer staffer Kaylois Henry wrote a story examining a national phenomenon of African-American theater. Some North Texas and national black stage artists quoted in it took umbrage at the nickname that these brassy, superficial, but successful touring musicals have earned — “the chitlin circuit.” That phrase…
From John Leguizamo’s Freak to Julia Sweeney’s God Said Ha!, confessional solo shows have been generating quite a bit of ink in theater pages over the last couple of years. Veteran actor John Davies is so aware of this that he has included in the promotional materials for his self-penned…
The gift for making great art is an elusive thing — some have it, most don’t, and any Saturday afternoon stroll through a handful of art venues can attest to that. But the talent for looking at art isn’t so elusive. Even if you don’t like a piece, your instincts…
As he drives back and forth to his weekday job, trying to wrest himself from the traffic jam that is Dallas, actor-writer-composer Dalton James finds his mind becoming an overflowing cornucopia of life’s big issues — sex, death, God, fate, and how slimy your underwear feels when it gets soaked…
In an episode of The Monkees, the boys try to help an old toy inventor named Harper, who can’t get his creations produced because the toy company’s manager, named only Daggart, manufactures toys designed by computers. Daggart says that when the children break or get bored with the shoddy computer-designed…
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero, the members of the group that eventually becomes known as the Mystery Men — they don’t really have a name through most of the movie — start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off, there’s the little…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of 20th-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
The Sixth Sense, a kind of touchy-feely horror movie, wants to do it all — scare the hell out of us at the same time that it makes us feel good about life and death. It wants us to believe that an 8-year-old boy in Philadelphia, Cole Sear (blue-eyed, winning…
Ten-year-old Fraser Pettigrew leads an idyllic existence. He lives on a bucolic estate in Scotland with five siblings, four dogs, his gentle mother Moira (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), eccentric inventor father Edward (Colin Firth), and indomitable grandmother Gamma Macintosh (Rosemary Harris). For Fraser (Robert Norman, making his professional acting debut), life…
GQ magazine runs a column every month titled “What Were We Thinking?” to present a ludicrous photograph of a famous person dressed in what the magazine had earlier decreed to be a style every hip cat would soon be wearing. In a few short years, it’s my guess that the…
Do you know why the burglars at the Watergate Apartments failed that fateful night in 1972, causing their own arrest and, ultimately, the resignation of Richard Nixon? Or why the famous electrical tape discovered by the security guard, alerting him of the presence of burglars in the offices of the…
For 27 years now, the reputation of playwright-actor Christopher Durang has grown but not necessarily evolved, if that makes sense. Certainly, his best-known plays are produced by small professional and adventurous community theaters all over the country (he can probably afford a house in the Hamptons on the residuals from…
There’s a lot more about the minefield of adult dating that’s recognizable in Miss-Matched, a world-premiere production of Dallas playwright Robin Armstrong’s script that closes the “All Dallas Playwrights” season of Pegasus Theatre. The empathy factor didn’t always make this scattershot show easier to take — Armstrong’s script needs to…
I had the idea that when I graduated from college, I would tour the country, hanging out at truck stops while listening to the adventures and wisdom of truckers. This would also involve eating a lot of pie at roadside diners. When I had enough of the road, I’d stop…
There’s no way to write about slam poetry if you don’t know what it is, don’t know what it means, don’t know how it feels. I’d just as soon run naked through the streets or through a mall or through a prison or through your house As get up on…
It’s so hot in Wichita Falls that the heat almost becomes a solid. The thermometer reads 107 degrees at this moment, with the heat index creeping toward 115. Even the breeze becomes an enemy when the mercury climbs this high. Imagine a thousand hair dryers aimed in your face –…
This week, “Stage” is running a section up the flagpole titled “You’re a Fool if You Missed…” to discover whether readers will salute insults, coercion, and contempt from the theater critic. Rather than exhorting folks to see a great play during the run, we decided to try it backward: browbeating…
It has been 24 years since Jaws changed the face of the film industry and made director Steven Whatshisname moderately well-known, and it’s probably safe to say that no aquatic horror film, let alone a shark film, will ever top it. So I’d like to think that director Renny Harlin…
Runaway Bride, the reunion of Pretty Woman stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel; it only feels like one. In everything, there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall, the…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Speed and Twister director Jan de Bont — an idea that should sound unpromising,…
International film critics who have raved about veteran French farceur Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game (Le Diner De Cons), only to qualify the goings-on in this serviceable but meringuey little chuckler as “cruel” and “punishing,” clearly haven’t taken in a comedy by American filmmaker Neil LaBute. In much the same…
Leslie Jordan, the 44-year-old veteran of TV sitcoms and dramas, is probably sick to death of hearing this, but the first thing you might whisper as he strides onto the stage is: “He’s so little.” Actors who make strong impressions often seem larger under the spotlight than they do in…
