A Hit and a Myth
for Golden AppleLyric Stage has polished up another forgotten gem of American musical theater. And what a gleaming beauty it is. The Golden Apple retells The Iliad and The Odyssey in grand comic operatic style, its characters plunked down in 1910 in a small town on Mt. Olympus in Washington. Lyric’s sparkling…
Ochre House’s latest oddity is a new light sci-fi drama written and directed by company member Kevin Grammer. Flower in the Machine takes its time — about an hour too much, frankly — to show what happens when romance withers in a world overrun by technology. Elizabeth Evans plays Girl,…
If you’re up on the local comedy scene, which seems to rotate around the nuclear hub of the Dallas Comedy House, you may have found yourself snort-laughing at jokes coming out of youngster, Saffy Herndon. The 9-year-old comedian, who tells jokes about everything from cartoons to her dad’s drinking habits…
Some comics travel for their trade because of their love of the art form or some inner need for attention or the hope of delivering to mankind a new plateau of understanding through the power of laughter. Lavell Crawford has a brutally honest reason for what keeps him going in…
Across Dallas stages, a long ignored genre of theater seems to have taken center stage. Science fiction, with all its robots, aliens, and future societies has been seen in its intellectual (Tomorrow Come Today at Undermain Theatre) and its campy (Rocky Horror Show at Dallas Theater Center). This weekend, Ochre…
When a play and the performances in it are as stirring as Jubilee Theatre’s The Brothers Size, it’s hard to find the right descriptives to do it justice. “Compelling” is too overused by critics. “Awesome,” too trite. Just know that the words of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and the work…
Hardly matters anymore if a musical is a hit or a flop on Broadway. Big regional companies like Addison’s WaterTower Theatre are so starved for new shows they’ll grab rights to anything that played a week or two in New York, as long as there are roles for hot young…
Theater companies and arts critics around Dallas have declared recent SMU drama grad Jeffrey Colangelo a budding genius as a playwright, director and fight choreographer. He’s certainly a genius at one thing: convincing people he’s brilliant with shows that are both boring and baffling in their lack of originality. His…
In the center of an abandoned warehouse, carpenters put the final screws into a sandbox big enough for a giant. Near the front of the box, a woman buries a man in the sand. She’s wearing a black leotard and a mask reminiscent of the reptilian birds from Labyrinth, he’s…
“Criminals have more fun” could’ve been the subtitle of the musical, Bonnie & Clyde, currently on stage at WaterTower Theatre. History’s law-breaking power couple certainly have a better time than the rest of their family in the Depression-era story. And it seems the actors playing them are having a damn…
The great comedians know that they don’t have to create fiction, they simply have to pluck out the insane bits of a world trying to wrestle with its sanity and present it in the way a carnival barker would just before he pulls back the curtain to reveal some horrid…
Three years ago, Shakespeare Dallas launched a project called, “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.” The gist was simple: Over five years, the company’s actors would recite every single word Shakespeare ever wrote in a monthly series of staged readings. This includes plays and poetry. According to the Folger Shakespeare…
Tennessee Williams described The Two-Character Play as his “most beautiful” drama after A Streetcar Named Desire. He may have been a bit too in love with his own words. It’s a haunting piece laced with poetry, madness and tragedy, but it’s no Streetcar. The current production of The Two-Character Play…
Director Michael Serrecchia has gathered some mighty big voices to play Little Women in the musical version of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas ends its season with this show. On a multi-level set by Rodney Dobbs that has the cast navigating steps made of giant stacks of…
At Dallas Children’s Theater, Rapunzel! Rapunzel! A Very Hairy Fairy Tale, directed by Nancy Schaeffer, is letting the title character’s hair down while bringing the house down with giggles of delighted young audiences. This is children’s theater at its best, cast with top professional grown-ups — Erika Larsen as the…
In 2012, Avant Chamber Ballet gavotted into Dallas promptly presenting more than a dozen world premiere ballets, as well as two regional premieres. The collaborative efforts of Artistic Director Katie Puder and Music Director David Cooper keeps the organization on its toes, pairing live chamber music with original choreography. With…
Like many Broadway musicals these days, Hands on a Hardbody was adapted from a movie. But unlike others, it came not from a splashy animated feature but from an obscure 1997 documentary by S.R. Bindler about an endurance contest at a Longview truck dealership that awarded a lipstick-red Nissan to…
By Sarah Wyatt “Once you’re on track that is really and truly YOUR track, you can’t help but make inspired choices in life,” writes Tig Notaro in our email conversation -the Caps Lock hers. Tig Notaro is a good person, a good friend, an honest person, and a very talented…
Shakespeare seems to be on the minds of Dallas theatre-makers this month. Last weekend, there was a staged reading of Romeo and Juliet at the Wyly Theatre, Shakespeare in the Bar at Wild Detectives, and of course, Dallas Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Now, Sundown Collaborative Theatre is taking their stab…
Good news: In the future, caftans make a comeback and toilet technology will be amazing. Bad news: Your house will know where you are and what you’re thinking at all times, the water will taste terrible and it will be too hot to ever go outside. In the world premiere…
Theater season is in full swing. Here are a few picks for your month…
This morning, KERA’s Jerome Weeks commented on my Facebook check-in at Shakespeare in the Bar last night with a link to a New Yorker article about Drunk Shakespeare, pointing out that New York did it first. I squinted at the screen, rubbed my aching head and thought, damn it, it’s…
