At last, some performances to get goose pimply about at the Festival of Independent Theatres, going on two more weekends at the Bath House Cultural Center. The first weekend brought forth Danielle Georgiou’s lively demi-dance-musical The Show About Men, which is exactly that and a lot of fun, and the…
You never know when inspiration will strike. It might lurk between the pages of a history textbook. For 17-year-old Chris Rodenbaugh, inspiration struck sometime in the 20th century while reading about the Irish Republican Army. He remembers reading about this violent rebellion for the first time in Tom Clancy’s Patriot…
If summer is giving you a case of Holly Golightly’s mean reds, join the club. You can’t have the blues in Dallas summers because you can’t gaze out your window longingly at the rain, because the water is drying up in the soul-sucking summer sun. Instead, the dash from one…
Inside D1 Sports Training, 30 women perform a newly learned dance routine on a small basketball gym floor. One woman, in the back, stops mid-performance to fix her top after realizing it had come undone. None of the other women notice because they are solely focused on their performance. It’s…
So many elements are sublime in the world premiere production of Brenda Withers’ The Quixotic Days and Errant Nights of the Knight Errant Don Quixote at Fort Worth’s Amphibian Stage. Director Matthew Earnest has put together a superb ensemble of local actors: Kitchen Dog star Jeremy Schwartz as Don Quixote,…
There are no prizes given to the best shows in the Festival of Independent Theatres, now in its 17th year at the Bath House Cultural Center at White Rock Lake. But there clearly were winners and losers among the first four of the eight productions that compose this year’s fest…
The Oddball Comedy Comedy and Curiosity Festival has become more than just an excuse to throw a bunch of comedians together on the same stage. It’s only three years old but it’s quickly become the cultural barometer for comedy in America. If you get a headlining spot on Funny or…
A whole lot of “yeehaw!” and yodeling goes on in The Kountry Girls, a new musical that just debuted at Theatre Three. That’s right, “Kountry” with a K. Because misspelled words are the hallmarks of great komedy. The “girls,” Dee Dee (Alexis Nabors) and May (Kelly Silverthorn), sling hash in their…
Time is an illusion, said Albert Einstein. No past, no future. Just existence in the dimension we perceive as the present. The theory of relativity might explain why Shakespeare Dallas director Raphael Parry has taken a 90-minute comedy, The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), and stretched it out to…
If you want to start a hullabaloo in the Dallas arts, tell a theater festival it might be time for a curtain call. That’s what our theater critic Elaine Liner wrote last year about the Festival of Independent Theatres, the annual event at the Bath House Cultural Center meant to…
If you go to a comedy club with the intention of getting drunk or even just enjoying a stiff drink, you have poor priorities in life. Going to a comedy club for drinks is like buying an airline ticket to score some peanuts. Any lightly seasoned alcoholic will tell you that…
Director Kevin Smith has added a second Dallas show to Texas Theatre this fall and now Jason Mewes will be along for the ride. After selling out a spoken word performance that will no doubt involve a long Q&A session, Smith has added a podcast recording of “Jay & Silent…
For a guy who murders two men and drives a 13-year-old girl to suicide, Romeo sure gets good PR spin in history. Thanks to William Shakespeare and centuries of skewed interpretation, “Romeo” is now synonymous with “great lover.” But considering what the boy gets up to in Romeo & Juliet,…
The Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts is presenting two one-act plays with social commentary on the very timely topic of race relations. Director Rockne Ragsdale wrote the first play, Guilty or Not Here I Come, in 1979 when he was just 22-years-old. This is the first time it…
Without actor B.J. Cleveland at the ready, Uptown Players could not have produced Douglas Carter Beane’s marvelous dark comedy The Nan ce. Cleveland is one of Dallas theater’s most versatile veterans, the sort of all-around, locally revered professional who bounces into leading roles in comedies, musicals, children’s shows and, too…
The theater can be a stuffy place. For that matter, a museum can be too. But across art forms, there is a movement toward something more authentic –something more raw. Certainly this DIY aesthetic isn’t new, but it’s gripping the young artists in Dallas in an unrelenting chokehold. And we’re…
Behind the Screen at Texas Theatre returns this weekend, bundling cinema, music, and comedy. It all starts with a screening of a documentary about Saturday Night Live, Live From New York! The film is based on a book of the same name, an oral history of the series that makes…
We know, we know. We weren’t ready to trade in sunshine for rain either. But it happens, and when it does, we call on our cock-eyed optimism to rearrange our plans. There aren’t sunny happy hours in our future, blame it on tropical but there are these wonderful events, plays,…
Nobody gets their fingernails done in Manicures & Monuments, a 30-year-old play by Dallas playwright Vicki Caroline Cheatwood that’s on in a respectably acted but outsized revival at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Think of it as Golden Girls meeting Steel Magnolias in a run-down nursing home in rural Oklahoma. Instead of…
Over the weekend, the great progressive suburb of McKinney barrel rolled into the the national conscience. A video showing footage of the McKinney Police Department’s response to a disturbance at a teenage pool party went viral, viewed by millions within a few hours. Emotions ran high on social media. But…
Audacity Productions’ Dallas Solo Fest at the Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park is presenting its second celebration of short shows written and performed by brave souls who aren’t afraid to go it alone. The standouts from the first weekend of the eight-show festival were Jill Vice’s Tipped & Tipsy…
The best play running on any Dallas stage right now is Precious Little, currently on at the Bath House Cultural Center. The best actor on any Dallas stage right now is in it — Sherry Jo Ward. In the production of Madeleine George’s strange, brief, beautiful play, directed with gentle…
