A lot of people love Billy Wilder’s 1957 movie version of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, if only for the chance to see Marlene Dietrich hag it up as the mysterious crone who delivers incriminating letters to a murder defendant’s attorney. Her dual role gave away the film’s most…
My philosophy is, if I throw enough words against the wall about how you should get out of the recliner and support your city theater artists, some of ’em have gotta stick. But this week, your second assignment is to head out to the coolest video/DVD store near you and…
As the opening-night world premiere of Fugitive Pieces progressed, I couldn’t shake the idea that playwright Caridad Svich was less inspired by Samuel Beckett–Waiting for Godot, specifically–than liable for intellectual theft under some copyright law. Anything worth having is worth stealing, as a colleague once observed, but the showcase production…
As the opening-night world premiere of Fugitive Pieces progressed, I couldn’t shake the idea that playwright Caridad Svich was less inspired by Samuel Beckett–Waiting for Godot, specifically–than liable for intellectual theft under some copyright law. Anything worth having is worth stealing, as a colleague once observed, but the showcase production…
Some 2,400 years after it was first staged at the midsummer Dionysus festival in Athens, The Trojan Women is oft resurrected as a pacifist theatrical statement. That’s understandable. The show is grueling in its depiction of the agonies of women and girls who suddenly find themselves rounded up and treated…
Southern Methodist University professor emeritus Margaret Loft directs three prodigiously able and alert actresses through a cataclysmic afternoon and evening in the life of one of Great Britain’s most influential psychoanalysts. Mrs. Klein happens to be Melanie Klein, the Austrian Jewish titan who strode into The British Analytical Society in…
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…
What a curious theatrical creature is Shakespeare for the Modern Man, Lesson 1: Macbeth, currently rattling the boards at Pocket Sandwich Theatre. I can’t count it as altogether successful, because there are so many sonic, thematic, and verbal threads running through it that playwright-adapter Scott A. Eckert couldn’t possibly work…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
