“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…
CORRECTION: Jeff Beckman, director of corporate communications for The Hershey Co., sent us a letter telling us our statements about the differences between the recipes between Hershey’s version and the British imported version of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk were incorrect. We’ve appended his letter to the bottom of this story. And…
At a brisk 55 minutes, Mike Bartlett’s four-character one-act Bull is just the right length. A minute more and the heightened tension in this piece might cause spontaneous human combustion. It’s that hot, that fierce. And that good. Second Thought Theatre’s production of the brutish British drama, directed by Christie…
Years ago, my love for theater was my entry point into journalism. A poetry student dog paddling in the social tsunami that was Southern Methodist University campus life, I signed on to write a few articles for the student newspaper about theater. Next thing I knew I was taking journalism…
Kinky Boots, now playing at Music Hall at Fair Park, is a size 6 show in a size 13 production. What a minor piece of musical theater, blown up and spread out on a big stage. And what a major disappointment for a show that won Tony Awards in 2013…
This past January, UNT’s improv group, Roll Out the Barrel, nabbed first place at the College Improv Tournament (CIT) Southwest Regional. This marks the second consecutive Southwest Regional win for UNT, with last year’s group, Cell Block Tango, taking home the prize in 2014. Roll Out the Barrel members Cotton…
Count on actor-writer-director-puppeteer and Ochre House regular Justin Locklear to bring his unique brand of weirdness to Doom McCoy and the Death Nugget, his original student-acted production (from an idea by Thomas Riccio) now at UTD’s University Theatre…
For his new play Mississippi Goddamn, Dallas playwright Jonathan Norton does something unexpected and a bit radical in his look back at the 1960s civil rights movement. Instead of simply lionizing Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary who worked to overturn Jim Crow laws and was assassinated on his own…
For musical lovers, the hottest ticket in town is the season subscription for the AT&T Performing Arts Center Broadway Series. These are the people who have brought Book of Mormon to Dallas twice, and continue to book Broadway’s blockbusters. Monday night, the theater announced its 2015/16 season, which doesn’t disappoint…
Ricky, Julian and Bubbles, known together as the infamous Trailer Park Boys, are the best known criminal comedy group in the world. The heavily hairsprayed Ricky, the googly eyed Bubbles and the cocktail clutching Julian get recognized in all four hemispheres, an even more impressive feat for a show that…
If you pitched me a musical theater revue in the end times that weaves obscure show tunes with original music, I’d spit my burnt coffee in your face. But we’re talking about you, not Taylor Mac and Mandy Patinkin. Those two could spill a jar of toothpicks and spend two…
This year Dallas theaters are in love with Shakespeare’s suicidal teenagers. Get ready for half a dozen productions of Romeo and Juliet, including big ones at Shakespeare Dallas and Dallas Theater Center. Plano’s Fun House Theatre and Film is doing a small one, but it’s lovely, with heartfelt performances by…
Cast away all doubts about Gilligan’s Fire Island, the latest comedy bamboozlement (with bamboo) from playwright Jamie Morris, who hasn’t met a classic TV sitcom he didn’t want to turn into an R-rated, cray-cray gay romp. Uptown Players’ laugh-till-you-wheeze production is awash with silliness on the Rose Room stage in…
Dallas actors Wendy Welch and Bob Hess struggle to make laughs happen as they ham their way through the one-act two-hander Sexy Laundry by Canadian playwright Michele Riml, now on in a production directed broadly by Terry Martin in WaterTower Theatre’s studio in Addison. Even these talented pros, so funny…
Putting the audience on couches sounds like a swell idea. Upholstered seating would seem to be a welcome alternative to those stiff green meanies you have to sit on in the main space at the Wyly Theatre. The chairs in the upstairs venues in that building are designed to remind…
