To celebrate her 50th anniversary as a choreographer, Twyla Tharp is actually giving us a gift. She’s going back out on a national tour debuting a program of new works, and Dallas is getting the biggest gift all–we get to host the opening night of the tour. On Sept. 18,…
By now, you’ve seen the approximately 400 billboards that have popped up along area thoroughfares: They’re black, with a white horse, and look a lot like advertisements for wine. I was actually fairly certain that Cavalia Odysseo was a nice Riesling until a couple of weeks ago when my daughter…
On his 60th birthday, astronomy professor Ansel Barber sits on his roof, staring through a telescope at the heavens. One by one, his family and friends crawl out a dormer window and bring him down to earth for a night of dark revelry and confrontation in the new musical Soft…
After five years of development, with workshops here and in New York City, Will Power’s musical Stagger Lee finally has its world premiere at Dallas Theater Center. With all that time and effort behind it, Power, who is DTC’s Mellon Foundation-funded playwright-in-residence and the Meadows Prize resident writer at SMU’s…
February’s dance round-up includes a performance from one of the most famous and notable American choreographers, the mounting of a classic, yet contemporary ballet, a performance art series that features dance, a Valentine’s Day event for you dance movie lovers, a concert that celebrates a historic month, a concert that…
The opera will always be operatic. This may seem a redundant, or obvious thing to write, but this can be the paramount struggle for a contemporary audience member. If you didn’t grow up on staples like Madame Butterfly or Carmen — and who really does anymore? — it’s unlikely you’ll…
Back in 2007, the late writer and thinker Christopher Hitchens caught a forklift load of flak for writing a story in Vanity Fair titled simply “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” He reasoned that men were funnier and more clever in comedy than women thanks to a trait guys picked up in…
Dark Circles Contemporary Dance is back with their annual Winter Series, but don’t go to their usual performance location, because they’ve moved. Get your phones out and type this in to Google Maps: Erma Lowe Hall, 3000 S University Drive, Fort Worth. Dark Circles will be premiering two new pieces…
Drinks and sexist attitudes fly in The Explorers Club, the protofeminist farce now playing in a chortle-worthy production at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Nell Benjamin’s 2013 play is set in 1879 Victorian London in the polished and paneled saloon of a poncy men’s club whose starchy members fancy themselves scientists and…
Every Paula Poundstone show is different thanks to the comedian’s ability to interact spontaneously with the crowd. Her shows take on the air of a dinner party — a host chatting with her guests before launching into stories about traffic, kids, cats and all things “everyday” — if dinner parties…
Suspend any expectation that the actor playing Truman Capote in the one-man play Tru, now on at Theatre Three, will attempt an impression of the author as accurate as the late Philip Seymour Hoffman did in his Oscar-winning performance in Capote…
Let’s do some basic forensics on how a thing as wretched as The Book Club Play got produced at the Dallas Theater Center. DTC is our big League of Resident Theatres professional showplace with a large staff dedicated to bringing top quality scripts, new and old, to audiences. There have…
The end of a movie marks the start of Annie Baker’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Flick, now on in a fastidiously directed and beautifully acted regional premiere at Undermain Theatre. The movie is The Naked and the Dead, a 1958 Raoul Walsh action film whose soundtrack throbs with the…
In her early 20s, at the beginning of her career as a professional dancer, Katelyn Harris thought she knew everything there is to know about tap dance. Then she started attending festivals. Part dance workshops and part performances, these weekend long events aren’t just places to work with some of…
Ronald K. Brown originally thought he would be a journalist or a playwright. Growing up surrounded by writers, it made sense; he had a knack for it too. But when he started doing musicals in high school, the dance passion took hold. During his childhood in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant, he…
“Everyone asks me what kind of dancing we do. If you asked a ballet dancer what I do, he would say that it is modern dance. If you asked a modern dancer what I would, he would say that it is ballet. I feel that at the edge of each…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. When you hear Linda Stogner’s act on stage, you get the sense that she lives in her own little world where common sense and normalcy don’t exist. But as Joel Hodgson once said, “That’s OK,…
It’s Monday. The weekend went by too fast, and you’re not jazzed about being back at work. You started your countdown to 5 p.m. the moment you walked in. But when 5 hits, you don’t really want to go straight home, and you did make that new year’s resolution to…
So much attention to detail goes into every show that Pegasus Theatre does in its trademarked “Living Black and White” style. Presented as a vintage piece of silver screen silliness come to life, the plays written by and starring Pegasus founder Kurt Kleinmann strip all the color from everything on…
2014 was an incredible year for dance in Dallas, but it did have its ups and downs. We had the rebirth of the Dallas DanceFest, Ann Williams, who founded and ran Dallas Black Dance Theatre, retired after 37 years (not down, but sad); yet, we gained the experience and expertise…
This was the year DFW’s favorite theater kids grew up. No longer newcomers on local stages — as actors, playwrights or companies — they did big things in big ways in 2014. Here’s a look back (and a glance ahead). Please hold your applause till the end. If you watched…
Once again, the Addison Improv hosted the final showdown for the Funniest Comic in Texas and this year’s honor went to two-time FCiT finalist and local comedian Linda Stogner. One-fourth of the Four Funny Females, Stogner went up against four strong sets from four equally talented comedians including Joel “Junebug”…
