Playwright Sarah Ruhl, still in her 30s, is a favorite of the “edgy” theater companies around here. But why? Her plays are witless and obtuse, hardly worth producing, much less paying to see. Melancholy Play, one of her early works (from 2001), is on view now at Upstart Productions at…
“If a blind girl won’t love ugly people, who will?” That’s the central dilemma in Toxic Avenger, the eye-popping, knee-slapping, sci-fi musical comedy getting its Broadway tryout right now at Houston’s Alley Theatre. If the ugly person in question is “Toxie,” the avenging alter ego of mild-mannered nerd Melvin Ferd…
Two hundred bucks is nothing to laugh at — that’s equivalent to your electric and phone bill, or your rent if you live a very sad, unfunny life in the shadows of a relative’s basement with only a hot plate for snuggling. (Note: when snuggling appliances I’ve found it helps…
WaterTower Theatre puts on a splendidly versatile showcase for the performing arts each year called Out of the Loop Fringe Festival. It was given Best Theater Festival in Dallas for a reason, namely because its organizers have curated a menu of talent that is so delightfully experimental that you, the…
Most of the laughs from Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off come from action, not dialogue. The play has three acts of nonstop physical comedy including doors slamming, pants falling, and plates of sardines and fire axes juggled among actors with split-second precision. In lesser productions than the great one going…
Call a play a farce and it damn well better be funny. Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is far and away the farciest of all modern farces. Full of slamming doors, sexy girls, mistaken identities and stray plates of sardines, Noises Off has been setting the standard for feather-light theatrical comedy…
Everyone’s favorite brassy Golden Girl Betty White turns 90 today! In addition to squeezing in every cameo and roast that can possibly be wrinkled into a schedule, she’s also managed to helm the new (gotcha!) prank show Betty White’s Off Their Rockers. In it, rehearsed sketches are interspersed with spontaneous…
The other night at the end of a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank at WaterTower Theatre, the lights went down on the final scene then came up with the cast assembled for bows. Instead of applause, the actors were met with complete silence. The lights went down again…
Strap in for a serious two hours and 15 minutes of dark, talky religious drama in David Ives’ New Jerusalem, now onstage at Fort Worth’s Stage West. But what a great ride it is. The time, place and subject are set in the lengthy subtitle of the fact-based play: The…
The idea for this Sunday’s Stripper Spelling Bee at Baby Dolls was first created in Montreal a few years back and didn’t include professional dancers as contestants. Strip spelling’s father, scientist and medical illustrator Sherwin Tjia, just kinda thought it would be fun. His contest operated under basic framework: take…
“I want to go on living after my death,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary around the age of 14. She wanted to be a professional writer when she grew up, a novelist maybe. Her book, she said in the diary, would be based on the two years she spent…
Creating the wide open spaces and big skies of West Texas for a huge piece of musical theater has presented an interesting set of problems for designer Allen Moyer. Now finishing up the final details on the scenery for Dallas Theater Center’s production of the musical version of Edna Ferber’s…
Start stretching now. This Friday and Saturday Dallas’ most limber fight it out for a pretty giant prize: a coveted spot on So You Think You Can Dance. Are you still on the fence about auditioning? No worries, we got you. Here are five reasons why you should (or shouldn’t)…
For 26 years, Pegasus Theatre has been taking the color out of stage comedy. They do it in “Living Black and White,” a trade-secret method of makeup, costume and scenery that strips all the color away onstage — except for the slip of an actor’s pink tongue or a glimpse…
Never underestimate the power of a well-placed flip of nipple tassel. That’s what my grandmother always told me, anyway. Grandpa always looked so happy … It’s okay if you don’t have the shimmy to shake or if your trunk junk drags deep. Burlesque is about celebrating what you got: You…
David Hirson’s tribute to Molière, La Bête, is the sort of play Theatre Three thinks they should be doing – but shouldn’t. The 1991 comedy, which has enjoyed a couple of decent Broadway runs, the latest starring the incomparable Mark Rylance, is written in rhymed couplets. Nobody wants to see…
Pegasus Theatre does only one production annually. One of their “Living Black and White” plays has opened at the Eisemann Center on the first weekend of the year since 2005. So we’ve come to expect that show to be a doozy. Their latest, The Frequency of Death!, is good, but…
For WaterTower Theatre’s first local production of August: Osage County, the Pulitzer-winning drama by Tracy Letts, director René Moreno sticks with the star of his acclaimed 2011 Oklahoma City production, longtime Dallas actress Pam Dougherty, in the lead as matriarch Violet Weston. She co-starred in 2009 as “Big Edie” in…
The list of actors we want to see more of on Dallas/Fort Worth theater stages this year includes a few we’ve seen a lot of in recent productions — a lot, as in their frontal and backal parts sans costume. Nudity has become so common among local theater companies, it’s…
Next year we’ll have the big-budget movie starring Hugh Jackman (as Jean Valjean) and Russell Crowe (as Javert) to compare it to, but right now you can see what critics and audiences are loving in the 25th anniversary touring production of Les Misérables, playing through Sunday at the Winspear. About…
It’s called Les Misérables, so don’t expect comedy. You don’t look to Victor Hugo’s depiction of the 1832 Paris uprisings for belly laughs. What there is in Les Miz, now at the Winspear Opera House on a 25th anniversary tour, is singing. Great, powerful, perfectly on-pitch caterwauling. The kind of…
In his backyard studio, behind a house packed to the rafters with books, photos, sculpture and paintings, Dallas actor-writer James Crump, 65, has re-created the world of early 20th century Western artist Charlie Russell. Crump has built a 30-foot-long wooden stage, which serves as the floor of Russell’s own studio…
