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…
A tight, quippy, gay-centric stage comedy like Chad Beguelin’s Harbor fits snugly at Uptown Players, where the 2012 play is getting its regional premiere in Kalita Humphreys Theater. Director Coy Covington has cast four actors so good they clearly outclass the so-so script. Uptown leading man Kevin Moore plays Kevin,…
Unless you’re a diehard George Bernard Shaw fanatic (and if you are, keep it to yourself), there’s little to recommend in WingSpan Theatre’s current Dear Liar at the Bath House. It’s a creaky old thing by the late Jerome Kilty, who wrote the play in the 1950s and got it…
Ask comedian Sebastian Maniscalco what he’s currently stressing over, and he doesn’t hesitate – home remodeling. Specifically his. “We have the contractors, and trying to figure out what tile to pick out,” he says. “People out there they can’t get work and they’re hungry and in the grand scheme of…
The future of theater in Dallas should be what The Drama Club is doing with Faust. This all-local consortium of disgustingly talented writers, actors, directors and designers has created a fresh and contemporary version of the old Goethe tale (with shades of Christopher Marlowe) of a doctor who sells his…
There never was a Jack the Ripper, you know. Between 1888 and 1891 in London’s Whitechapel, 18 women were killed by sharp instruments. Some victims were prostitutes. Five were thought to have been murdered by the same person. He, or she, was never found, never brought to justice. Suspects…
When a musical bills itself as scary, it’s natural to be a little dubious. Unless what scares you are chorus girls or people who sporadically break into song and dance — which, granted, can sometimes be pretty horrifying — the odds of a staged musical sending a shiver down your…
