Any way you slice it, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is as classic a holiday offering as fruitcake. And like that redoubtable dessert, it’s best served fresh, a little nutty and with extra dollops of sweetness. Three DFW theaters are ending the year with productions of A Christmas Carol. They’re…
Rule No. 1 of British “panto”: Be ready to play and sing along. No, go ahead. You’ll enjoy it. The panto is a traditional form of British children’s theater that pops up at the holidays. A little naughty, a whole lot nice, pantos are typically based on familiar fairytales and…
What good reason might explain actor Leah Spillman being clad only in skimpy pink panties and a sheer white tank top in her first scene in Kitchen Dog Theater’s The Totalitarians? In the sexist and unsexy four-character 2014 play by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Spillman’s character, Francine Jefferson, is an ambitious…
Composer Mark Adamo knows what you are thinking when you hear the words “Christmas opera” (he can see the sugar plum fairies dancing across your mind). “It’s an opera about Santa Claus as a young boy,” he says with a laugh. “People hear that and they start looking for their…
Before America succumbed to the insane ravings of right-wing media nut-jobbery, the only “war on Christmas” was one based in the notion that the birth of Jesus was exploited for profit by retail businesses. There was too much Christmas in the public square, said solemn theologians and some politicians in…
Imperfect people struggling to free themselves from messy circumstances can make for good drama. But actors fumbling with accents and mumbling lines as they play those imperfect people — as they do in Undermain Theatre’s The Night Alive by Conor McPherson — just make a mess of a pretty good…
The first sound you hear in Stage West’s production of The Heir Apparent is a tremendous fart. That could serve as commentary on the rest of the play. Playwright David Ives’ flatulent adaptation of a fluffy 18th century French comedy is written in rhyming couplets. All of it. Hours of…
Everyone at Plano’s Fun House Theatre and Film is far too young to be doing Arthur Miller’s epic tragedy Death of a Salesman. And yet they succeed in creating one of the best acted, most emotionally lucid productions of this play to hit a local stage in years. Director Susan…
Everyone dies. It’s opera. So no big surprises there. You don’t go to the opera to be shocked by a sudden plot twist. You go to the opera to hear beautiful music sung by immensely talented performers and the Dallas Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s tragic opera, Tosca delivered. The…
Winning a Pulitzer Prize for drama doesn’t mean a play deserves to become a classic. Horton Foote’s The Young Man from Atlanta (Pulitzer 1995) and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1998) dated themselves quickly and were weak choices to start with. In this decade, Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park…
Blink, a sour-then-sweet new play-with-music written and directed by Ochre House regular Kevin Grammer, echoes the theme of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in its lesson about not wasting life fiddling with material possessions. “Shit happens in a blink of an eye,” sings Marti Etheridge in the first of the folky…
They don’t build musicals like Grand Hotel anymore. They don’t build lodging like Berlin’s Grand Hotel anymore either. Even in 1928, when the musical is set, the “guests” are aware that an era of opulence is fading. Characters check in for their last fabulous fling, one more waltz under the…
“Did you come here together,” a woman in a white lab coat asks, pointing between myself and Caroline North, who happens to be the Observer’s copy editor, an arts reporter and my friend. Yes, we answer. “Does she like you more than you like her?” she asks me. I don’t…
It’s Dallas. It’s Sunday. The Cowboys play at three o’clock. Every Dallasite knows that you need to plan around that. You go to the early service at church, youth soccer games are scheduled in the morning and no sensible Opera company would plan a matinee for that day. But thats…
Across the country, opera audiences are thinning. The old guard is getting older and youthful cans aren’t plunking down in the chairs. So while there’s something inherently bratty about saying “I would prefer this free thing over this other one,” just follow me here. Dallas Opera has been busy funding,…
“I’ll be frank with you, I really don’t have anything,” said Erykah Badu as she walked barefoot onto the stage in the Naomi Bruton Theater downtown Thursday night for the first of three performances of her new one-woman show, Live Nudity. She was only slightly exaggerating. Badu had a few…
Stand-up comedians may be alone on a stage in a physical sense but spiritually speaking, they are never by themselves. They are constantly swarmed by the spirits of the comedians who inspired. The memories and inspirations of comedians who pushed them to walk on to a stage will always be…
This weekend’s two-day get-together in Studio City, Calif., of dozens of SMU theater grads from the 1970s and ’80s might turn out to be the greatest cast ever assembled of accomplished middle-aged American character actors from stage, screen and television. The guest list, according to reunion planner Judi Dickerson (MFA,…
Once a year, usually in the fall, the Dead White Zombies emerge from the mind of Thomas Riccio. An immersive theater troupe run by experimental theatermaker Riccio, the Zombies have taken over everything from a former crack house to ramshackle warehouses. Last year, the group took over a former Ice…
The Teen Scene Players at Dallas Children’s Theater are winding up a short run of The Ghosts of Sleepy Hollow, a new one-hour adaptation by Philip Schaeffer of 19th century stories by Washington Irving. It’s a beautiful looking production, directed by Artie Olaisen, but the skills of the storytellers are…
Out of the shadows and into the pale golden glow of dozens of candles, the Grim Reaper, in various guises, takes his (or her) star turn in Theatre of Death, a collection of seven short plays on a single theme, produced and performed by Mark-Brian Sonna’s MBS Productions in the…
Charlie is so fat that he eats, works and sleeps on his couch, a stained horror of abused upholstery. Sitting atop stacks of old books, the couch sags amid mounds of fast-food containers, soda cans, candy wrappers, chip bags — a rotting reliquary waiting for Charlie to wheeze his last…
