Nobody does big American musicals like Lyric Stage, the Irving theater company that does only musicals and only in the biggest way possible. Their season-ender, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 70-year-old classic Oklahoma!, brings the show back to where it started, with all the usually omitted songs back in place, 30 singers…
The singing, dancing cowboys in Lyric Stage’s Oklahoma! compete for your attention this week with the singing, dancing seventh president in Theatre Three’s Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson. With Jersey Boys and its singing, almost-dancing quartet of lovable mooks back in town for a month-long run at the Winspear, there may…
Summer is the season for light comedy at the theater and Boeing-Boeing, the farce now running at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, will have your giggle muscles going boing-boing for two solid hours of funny. It’s a 1960s play, resuscitated successfully on Broadway three years ago, about one playboy (played here by…
As I settled into my seat at the Winspear on Saturday night, I found myself in conversation with a young woman next to me. She mentioned that her parents had bought a block of tickets but couldn’t find anyone to use them. Strange, I said: Cosby’s a legend. Then again,…
It’s not the first prestigious invitation that Dallas Black Dance Theatre has received, simply the most recent. The oldest, continuously operated professional dance company in Dallas, DBDT has built an extensive résumé of elite performances, representing the city everywhere from Washington state to New York to Austria. Since its founding…
Shut the front door. And the kitchen door. And the bathroom and bedroom doors. If it’s a farce, and WaterTower Theatre’s Boeing-Boeing is a classic one, count on doors swinging open and slamming shut with split-second precision. The six characters in this 1962 Marc Camoletti sex comedy burn oodles of…
Like fellow Oklahoman Tracy Letts (of August: Osage County fame), playwright Vicki Caroline Cheatwood has a good ear for how people in that state talk to each other. Plain-spoken, yes, but with a certain poetry to the flow of everyday speech. She’s lived in Dallas for many years, but Cheatwood…
Where are the great new American plays coming from? Not just from East Coast graduate programs that follow the Paula (How I Learned to Drive) Vogel model, no matter how many of those dreary dramas Dallas Theater Center tries to force upon us. Not from the ranks of hot TV…
There isn’t a “splatter zone” for Dallas Theater Center’s production of the play God of Carnage, but maybe there should be. A massive, catastrophic bout of vomiting by a character happens early on, a wave of chunky barf that splashes over the scenery furniture and across the floor of the…
Memorial day weekend marked the third installment of Fort Worth Opera’s four-weekend long opera festival, as well as the company’s regional premiere of Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata. This year’s festival draws from a wide range of old and new, light and dark, serious and comedic in its offerings, and the four…
When Ochre House founder Matthew Posey gets his teeth into something, he takes big bites. For his latest play, Cicerone, he’s masticating his way through the life and loves of Tropic of Cancer author Henry Miller. As playwright, director and star of this production, Posey gives himself the best role,…
At Fort Worth’s Stage West, Texas’ brashest political commentator lives again in the one-woman play Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins. Actress Georgia Clinton portrays Ivins in the production directed by Dana Schultes. The 70-minute performance, written by twin journalists Allison and Margaret Engel, is built around…
Are we barbarians under our civilized veneers? Or are we just big babies in grown-up clothes, ready to throw tantrums when we don’t get our way? French playwright Yazmina Reza’s Tony-winning 2009 play God of Carnage (translated by Christopher Hampton) asks those and other questions about adults who should know…
Is any group more loved than the Harlem Globetrotters? I don’t think so. These guys have double-dribbled joy to all over the world, and today team member Special K Daley is in town enchanting lucky kids at a couple of Dallas schools. Teachers, look out: your personal belongings will likely…
Dallas writer Vicki Cheatwood’s new play Ruth is a modern retelling of the Ruth and Naomi story from the Old Testament. What Cheatwood went through personally while writing it, however, sounds more like the Book of Job. Debuting Friday, May 25, at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary as the centerpiece of…
Children of public broadcasting know Steve Smith as Red Green, the king of duct tape inventiveness. His Canadian program held its place on the dial for 300 episodes, inviting all who tuned in to receive Smith’s folksy dispatches from Possum Lodge, a quirky men’s club resting just beyond the periphery…
Turns out Green Day and Molly Ivins had a lot in common. The musical American Idiot at the Winspear Opera House and the one-woman play Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins at Fort Worth’s Stage West both let their central characters rage at the rodeo clowns who…
Join the swarm at the regional premiere of the kids’ musical comedy Diary of a Worm, a Spider & a Fly, now onstage at Dallas Children’s Theater. They do things big at DCT, but this may be their biggest show yet. Directed by Bob Hess, acted by grown-up professionals, it’s…
The whiff of menace enters the room right at the top of The Birthday Party, the 1958 Harold Pinter dark comedy now on view at Deep Ellum’s Undermain Theatre. An older couple, Petey and Meg (T.A. Taylor and Mary Lang), are going about their daily breakfast ritual in the dining…
Something bugging you? Hop over to Dallas Children’s Theater to catch the regional premiere of the delightful Diary of a Worm, a Spider & a Fly. The 20-song “feeler”-good musical by Joan Cushing, directed by Bob Hess, adapts three eco-conscious children’s books by Doreen Cronin. In 105 minutes of creepy-crawly…
Yep, this clip is super old and rather dated, but it’s still funny. This brassy lady is part of Chelsea Handler’s clique of touring broads. You’ve seen her as the semi-evil waitress in Are You There Chelsea? and as a recurring panelist on Chelsea Lately. Known for her whip-smart approach…
Matt Lyle’s new play The Better Doctor has a lot to say about the American healthcare industry. But it says it without talking. As the latest in Lyle’s series of “silent films for the stage,” Doctor keeps the actors on mute. It’s like The Artist meets ER. If only the…
