No matter how skilled the storyteller, it can sometimes be hard to tell a story. This task becomes immeasurably more difficult when the teller is expected to fully transform into the character both physically and mentally. To further complicate things, add the fact that your protagonist has a personality that…
Get connected. Go to Mars with some guy named Jon. Reverse roles and play a game. Watch a lizard boy eat a Dorito. Talk about white Russians with Tyler’s mom. All of these things and more will happen at Sundown Collaborative Theatre’s “We’ve Done It Again: A Mixtape,” the group’s…
“60 pulses of storytelling is how we like to describe it,” Artistic Director Dominic D’Andrea says of his One Minute Play Festival (#1MPF), making the fest sound suspiciously like theater for the ADD-addled 21st century. In actuality the #1MPF is anything but. This year Kitchen Dog Theater will play host…
At WaterTower Theatre, time shifts to 1964 in San Francisco. Young Marines head out onto the town before they’re shipped off to a growing war in Southeast Asia. They are looking for a good time, hounding for women. Eddie Birdlace happens upon Rose, a young musician working a late-night shift…
Where did the summer go? It’s been a relatively quiet and cool one this year, and that can only mean one thing. That we’ve all been be resting and waiting for August to hit and for the performance season to start again. Dancers who have been gone all summer training…
Maribeth Monroe is one busy lady. She’s starring in a new dark comedy for HBO called The Brink about a geopolitical whirlwind that could bring about World War III. She’s gearing up to shoot the new season of Workaholics where she plays the perpetually stressed and enraged boss, Alice. Plus,…
A new TV show is trying to bring stand-up comedy back to mainstream television in a way that doesn’t pit eager chuckle monkeys against each other in a battle of meaningless challenges that have nothing to do with comedy. Two names who first took to the mic in Dallas’ burgeoning…
It’s little wonder that no theater until Dallas’ Uptown Players has attempted the bio-musical The Boy from Oz in the decade since it closed its run on Broadway. Hugh Jackman won a Tony in that Broadway production, starring as its flamboyant title character, bisexual Australian singer-songwriter-showman Peter Allen. When Jackman’s…
WWE returned to American Airlines Center this Sunday, and this being a culture blog, we asked Jaime-Paul Falcone to go and send a sketch of what exactly goes at a WWE Live event. Drama, that’s what. Lots of drama, plus merchandising. ACT I Scene 1: Thousands of neon-clad children run…
Shuffle, ball, change. Aaaaaand, dig! Those are the only tap dance words that stuck with me from the beginner adult class I took last fall. Turns out, you need rhythm to tap, and I’ve got zero. But it just looks so darn fun when dancers fly around the stage creating…
Saturday is National Dance Day, another day that you can celebrate through clever Facebook status updates, Instagram hashtags, and throwback photos to your drill team days and those terrible costumes your dance teachers used to make you wear. Or, you could actually get off your butt and dance. Novel idea,…
Like an old actor no longer able to remember his lines, maybe the Festival of Independent Theatres needs to be led gently out of the spotlight for good. The annual FIT fest, as it’s redundantly known, was conceived 16 years ago to give small companies a chance to produce new…
There’s a running joke among critics that the reason they are given aisle seats is that they are statistically more likely to die during a play than another audience member. On the aisle, the dead critic is more easily removed from the theater. The death of the critic is something…
The Dallas DanceFest is back. After a 10-year hiatus, the festival that began with outdoor performances at the Annette Strauss Square returns with the same premise but a new venue, the Dallas City Performance Hall. Its original debut in 1985 started off small, featuring only three companies: Dallas Black Dance…
Jonathan Norton almost didn’t apply for the Artistic Innovations grant twice. But the third time was the charm for the local playwright, who was awarded a $15,000 grant from the Mid-America Arts Alliance this week. Of 137 applicants, Norton was one of 15 recipients of the grants, “awarded to support…
From the first line of Christhelmet, you know you’re in for something special in this gritty, great new musical written, directed by and starring Matthew Posey at his 40-seat Ochre House Theatre. “There’s gonna be a lot of feelings felt this summer,” warns Rosie (Dante Martinez), the jaded barkeep of…
The annual Festival of Independent Theatres is underway at the Bath House Cultural Center. Opening night featured two of the eight shows by companies too small to have their own permanent spaces. Instead of a dazzling launch for the four-weekend fest, however, the productions by PrismCo and Nouveau 47 were…
For four years, Uptown Players has taken a week to celebrate its existence as the city’s LGBT-centric theater. In every season, the company presents shows that that connect with or describe the gay identity, but during the Pride Performing Arts Festival, the shows are more unabashed. This week, Uptown Players…
Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, better known by first name only, are the radical comedy duo that speaks directly to the sensibilities of an entire generation of fans, while the generation before it struggles to understand just what the hell is so funny. It can be fun to observe parents…
Standing outside the light brick structure of the Bath House Cultural Center that lies nuzzled against one of the less-trodden sides of White Rock Lake, Shelby-Allison Hibbs happily admits that the artistic hub has been like a second home to her. Hibbs, a theatre director who obtained her MFA from…
Turns out the revolutionary way to stage Les Misérables is to take the French revolutionaries out of it entirely. No frilly shirts. No peasants waving big red flags. None of that ghastly marching-in-place every other Les Miz (or Les Mis, if you prefer) uses for clap-bait toward the end of…
Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth wants you to help them choreograph their next piece. Really. If you have the desire to make somebody’s body wiggle, this might be your chance. With their latest offering, Some Assembly Required, Artistic Director Kerry Kreiman and her dancers are reaching out to the social media world…
