Inevitably when something in pop culture becomes officially popular, there is a rush from production studios and fans to spin it off into as many different forms of media as possible from a series of TV show spinoffs to a Saturday morning cartoon to a supremely sugary breakfast cereal. Welcome…
By Linda Smith Pyotr Tchaikovsky was never a fan of his last opera Iolanta, finished a year before his death in 1893. He felt it repeated themes from his earlier operas, and the plot is simple, especially when compared to other works in the operatic genre. As such, it is…
All painting isn’t an act of theater, but it can be. Which is why the next Prism Co. show sounds as much like a live painting event as it does a play. That’s the wonderful thing about this young, upstart company: They aren’t just stretching the definition of what theater…
What did you do over your Easter weekend? Most of you without children probably didn’t even realize it was Easter until you noticed an upsurge in Cadbury Creme Eggs at drug stores and creepy, humanoid rabbits taking over the city (outside of the usual furry convention season, too). Comedian roommates…
Like the canned meat product for which it’s named, the musical comedy Spamalot is a funny-looking conglomerate of weird ingredients, some easily identifiable, some a bit gross. Granbury Theatre Company, the community-based troupe at the historic Granbury Opera House south of Fort Worth, has a tasty fry-up of Monty Python’s…
Dallas Summer Musicals, so often the host of half-baked road-weary tours of recent Broadway flops, has produced its own fairly lavish and beautifully cast revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic The King and I, now winding up its short run at Fair Park. It’s a good time to get…
“This isn’t your English class’ Shakespeare,” Katherine Bourne says in our new video of Shakespeare in the Bar, the wildly popular theater series at Wild Detectives. She’s right about that. We’ve told you how much fun we’ve been having at these pop-up theater performances at the bookstore/coffeeshop/bar in the Bishop…
For the last 15 years, T.J. Jagodowski and David Pasquesi of the comedy duo of T.J. & Dave have started their shows with the same, simple method. They walk out on stage, introduce each other and assure the crowd, “Trust us, this is all made up.” Some music plays, the…
It’s often been said that writers and artists work best when they have a gun to their head. A theater in Plano will provide five casts with that kind of motivation, and since this is Texas, we should probably mention that it will only be a proverbial gun. Rover Dramawerks…
When the Dallas Comedy House booked Jackass star Preston Lacy to be one of their headliners for the stand-up section of their annual Dallas Comedy Festival, they had to make a special agreement. “I had to agree with the venue that I wouldn’t be bringing any animals or weapons or…
The fewer people onstage in Theatre Three’s heavily populated Hot Mikado, the more fun the show. A 1986 adaptation by David H. Bell and Rob Bowman of an even older jazz version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, this one is directed and designed with an emphasis on frenetic movement…
The woman we meet in Irish-born writer Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary is no ethereal virgin. She’s a pissed-off mother of a wayward son, tired of the “misfits” who followed him around, angry that 20 years after his death she’s a prisoner of apostles who just want her to…
Next Tuesday kicks off the 6th annual Dallas Comedy Festival at the Dallas Comedy House. The giant celebration of improv, sketch, stand up and short film comedy has grown tremendously over the years, bringing in performers from all over the country. This year, the festival will host 27 stand up…
Agatha Christie’s 1943 whodunit And Then There Were None is packing them in at Plano’s Cox Building Playhouse. Audiences love a well-done mystery and this one, creaky as it is, and so repetitive in its three acts that you might wish the murderer would kill faster, is sufficiently entertaining…
“I am sick to death of cleverness,” says the character Jack Worthing in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. “Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few…
In fall of 2013, tucked away in a small upstairs space in the Kalita Humphreys Theatre in Turtle Creek, a small cast of actors began to sing the first few lines of a musical. Recognizable from a staged reading at the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival in 2010, the…
As the curtain opens at the Dallas Opera, behind it are glimpses of the city of lights of a century ago complete with shop-fronts stenciled with French appellations and Parisian apartments whose residents are visible in their second-floor windows. Scenic designer Jean-Pierre Ponnelle has created a vivid world that invites…
How much you’ll enjoy Dallas Theater Center’s production of Molière’s The School for Wives might depend upon your tolerance for rhyming dialogue. Can you stand an evening of rhyming couplets without the urge to throwy uplet? It’s a quaint old thing, this 353-year-old French comedy about one man’s desire to…
Unrequited love, that hard right to the heart, that sharp cut to the gut, has inspired two good new solo shows by local actor-writers Van Quattro and Brad McEntire. Quattro’s Standing 8 Count and McEntire’s Cyrano A-Go-Go were audience faves on the opening weekend of the 14th annual Out of…
“It’s like ‘Miami Vice’ in there,” says artistic director Tina Parker as I wander into the back offices of Kitchen Dog Theater on an overcast Tuesday afternoon. “Complete sensory overload.” For the season’s next play, company member Lee Trull reconfigured the wildly likable Oscar Wilde play, The Importance of Being…
Navigating the Loop can be a complicated, down to the wire process. It’s a variegated 10-day festival of theater, dance, and performance, and unless you’ve cleared your schedule, it’s unlikely you’ll get to see it all, so you’ll need to plan accordingly. Critics will give you the rundown of picks…
Live music and live dancers? Avant Chamber Ballet is already busy bringing that back to the stage. Powerful women in dance? Dallas isn’t wanting for dance troupes with strong female representation–after all, ACB is one of them. OK, fine. What about women creating the dance? The argument stands that there…
