The first recorded theatrical performance, according to anthropologists studying Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France, was an audience-participation comedy. Several Cro Magnon hunters reenacted how Og, the tribal fool, was run through the kidney by a woolly rhinoceros during a particularly raucous foraging party. Meanwhile, the audience encouraged the players…
Is the theater really dead? Not in Big D. In fact, a quickie look at area productions in the past year shows that theater in the Metroplex is a surprisingly lively, diverse, and resilient form of entertainment. Consider the options a curious (but not impecunious) boulevardier had to choose from…
Like a remorseless killer in a grade-Z slasher flick, The Fantasticks keeps coming back. You can strafe it, bomb it, drive it over the edge of a cliff, but it will not die. Since its May 1960 opening, this small, saccharine musical has run through 10,000 off-Broadway performances, and is…
If playwrights and producers would only subscribe to the “Journal of the American Medical Association,” they wouldn’t have to waste so much time worrying about the nature of laughter and what generates it. As the journal points out, laughter is merely a matter of the levator labbi superioris muscle lifting…
What, the Dickens again at the Dallas Theater Center? You bet your suet pudding. This is DTC’s 12th annual production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and practice, as they say, makes perfect. With enough dazzling visual effects to satisfy the Andrew Lloyd Webber whizbang crowd, and with an emotional punch…
The shadow of marital infidelity falls dark and heavy over the theater, perhaps because that subject is particularly suited to the claustrophobic confines of the stage. Audiences can sit close to actors who piece together the tortured mosaic of betrayal and be forced to question their own boundaries of love…
Sin and redemption are the favorite themes of Janet Farrow, a skilled, intuitive adapter and a flamboyant, if sometimes overly mannered, director. Farrow imported her fierce love for classical literature from the American Shakespeare Repertory Theater in New York City to our arts-unfriendly city and created Classic Theatre Company five…
Goethe is one of those heavyweight writers (mostly Russian or German) who everyone admires but who no one reads. In fact, in these post-literate times, you can now get into Mensa just by being able to pronounce Goethe’s name correctly. You no longer have to study Cliffs Notes on Faust,…
With Ohio Tip-Off, the Dallas Theater Center takes aim at the merry dance of dreams and commerce that is professional sports. Unfortunately, it puts up an air ball. The play takes for its subject the Ohio Shakers, a team mired in the recesses of the downscale Continental Basketball Association. The…
“Back in the old days,” Chuck Carson, MC of the first annual Leon Rabin Awards was saying to a well-coiffed crowd, “Dallasites used to show their displeasure with a play by torching the theater. Now, we just don’t go.” Carson, a Dallas native and professional wiseacre, put his thumb on…
There are as many ways of looking at death as there are ways to die, and eventually we all have to pick the way that suits us best. Spanish playwright Alejandro Casona tinkers with this idea in The Lady of the Dawn, a spooky drama that fits the crepe and…
Katharine Hepburn took a lot of razzing for repeatedly rasping “The loons! The loons!” in the movie version of On Golden Pond. Insouciant young wags couldn’t help but point out that Katharine the Great was acting a bit loony herself. There’s plenty of other stuff in both the movie On…
“All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s famous opening lines to Anna Karenina lifted the lid on the pot of stewing emotions that exist in almost every familial setting. A lot of writers have poked around in that pot since, Arthur Miller…
You never know what you’re going to get when you go on an anti-communist tirade. Take The Invisible Circus. It never would have come into being if Joe McCarthy hadn’t made things too hot in America for artists like Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin emigrated to Switzerland to escape the ill wind…
Where would children’s literature be without the Brits? Fairy tales and other traditional stories aside, it’s British writers, most of them active from the late 1800s to about 1950, who created the canon of works for children that most of us grew up with. Take away Lewis Carroll, George McDonald,…
This production poses for the umpteenth time the hoary philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” It’s not the play itself that’s directly concerned with this conundrum, however. Rather, it’s the fact that the play is being performed…
Rosanne Rosanna Danna was right. It’s always something. Take paranoia. Just when we’ve learned to stop worrying about the Bomb, the Bug crops up to give us the collective willies. Mushroom clouds have been supplanted by super viruses as the peril du jour–a peril that threatens to spread across the…
If there’s one thing audiences won’t put up with these days, it’s exposition. Like a horny teenager, they want to cut right to the chase. The current obsession with getting to the bottom line makes Murder on the Nile a tough play to stage. Agatha Christie, the old sot, likes…
There are soreheads among us who claim to dislike musicals as a dramatic form because they lack verisimilitude. Orchestral music doesn’t well up and people don’t break into song at the drop of a hat in real life the way they do in musicals, these dry, mostly Norwegian nitpickers complain…
Right-thinking people–and Woody Allen agrees with me on this–would much rather live in the 1930s than endure our current decade, if somehow they had a choice. No, not the real Thirties, with its bread lines, fascist pogroms, lynchings, and all of that. I mean the champagne-laced Fred and Ginger Thirties,…
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…
