Rolling off of last year’s success, the Uptown Players announced that, following popular demand, a previously unplanned Dallas Pride Performance Arts Festival has just been scheduled for September 9-15, coinciding with the 29th Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade on September 16. (Applications for which can be found here, with an…
No doubt about it, getting gorgeous actors into Bible-based musicals and Shakespearean tragedies definitely ratchets up the “let’s go see it” factor. Right now Dallas/Fort Worth stages have a bumper summer crop of beauts, male and female, trodding the boards. It’s hard to winnow the list to a mere 10,…
Quick, while temps have dipped slightly below heatstroke levels, make plans to catch Shakespeare Dallas’ Twelfth Night at Samuell-Grand Amphitheater. You can take a picnic or sack of snacks with you. Flop onto your blanket or low lawn chair and soak up some culture as the sun sets over cottonwood…
Playwright and SMU grad Beth Henley won a Pulitzer for her 1981 Southern gothic comedy Crimes of the Heart. Interesting to note that the 1981 Pulitzer for fiction went to John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. It was a good year for literature about idiots in Dixie. Crimes, now…
Among things you can see in Dallas Theater Center’s production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Wyly Theatre: Old Testament characters playing basketball and plugged into iPods; a giant wooden pyramid that breaks apart like a cool toy from a museum…
The folks from Old Murder House Theatre warned me last week that the only way to make it through their live reenactment of Jurassic Park was to hold onto my butt. And held on I did. From the moment the first park worker was devoured by an imaginary Velociraptor to…
Leave it to director René Moreno (profiled in this week’s “People” issue) to find a way to make Coriolanus hot. For Shakespeare Dallas’ first production of this rarely done bit of Bard, Moreno cast the easy-on-the-eyes (and ears) actor Alex Organ in the title role. He plays Shakespeare’s lonely warrior,…
The audience-goes-crazy moments are cleverly written into the book of Jersey Boys, the long-running hit Broadway musical on view at the Winspear for three more weekends. Frankie Valli and his three pals, known as The Four Seasons, start out singing on street corners in New Jersey and work their way…
A flood of flawed heroes! An abundance of bounders and bastards! A cavalcade of troubled characters has arrived on summer’s stages. First up, because he’s heavily armed and insists upon’t, is Coriolanus. William Shakespeare’s lonely Roman warrior is a fierce 5th century B.C. battlebot with nothing but contempt for common…
Kent, you lost me at “and four.” Do you think you can dance? Do want to “co-star” in Dallas Theater Center’s just-opened production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Wyly Theatre? DTC posted a challenge this week on its Facebook page. Joseph director/choreographer Joel Ferrell is offering…
Update 11:07 a.m.: Louis C.K.’s show sold out in nearly twelve hours. Read more in our followup: Louis C.K.’s Plan Worked, and You Can’t Buy Your Way Out Of It. Update 2:06 p.m.: A second show has been added, later the same evening at the Majestic. Awesome. The subject line…
Dallas actor Cameron Cobb played Hamlet in 100-degree heat in Samuell-Grand Park last summer for Shakespeare Dallas. He portrayed numerous roles, male and female, in Kitchen Dog’s excellent two-hander The Turn of the Screw this spring. Now it’s his manifest destiny to occupy the title role in Theatre Three’s rude…
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…
