Speaking of sprawling, epic trailers… Back in November, the Dallas Theater Center officially announced the cast and creative team for Giant, you know the musical, which is running at the Wyly in 2012 save for some unplanned zombie apocalypse. Now, courtesy of a hat tip from Unfair Park, there’s a…
The real world beyond their stage doors may have been spinning from disaster to disaster, but somehow in the land of make-believe inside Dallas theaters, 2011 turned out to be an absolute annus mirabilis. There were great shows and memorable performances in grand halls and bijou playhouses all around us…
You have until Christmas Eve to catch Dallas Theater Center’s robust production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. For this one, the company moves back to its old home at Kalita Humphreys Theater on Turtle Creek, and that’s a treat. Kalita really is such a perfectly snug place to stage…
There’s something to be said for seeing the world in shades of gray. For 26 years that’s been the philosophy of Dallas’ Pegasus Theatre, which performs its annual murder mystery comedy in trademarked “Living Black and White” style. This year’s show, opening at the Eisemann Center in Richardson on December…
Given that their core audience comes on buses from places where risk-taking might mean eating dinner past 5, One Thirty Productions is surprisingly edgy with the choice of Greetings! as a Christmas season play. Tom Dudzick, sometimes called the “Catholic Neil Simon,” has written something that ventures way outside any…
If you haven’t experienced the wacky tradition of the holiday season English “panto,” get yourself to Theatre Britain’s production of Jackie Mellor-Guin’s Dick Whittington, currently onstage at Plano’s Cox Building Playhouse. It’s broad comedy on two levels: a fun fairytale for the kiddies, some mildly bawdy double entendres for the…
There’s something to be said for seeing the world in shades of gray. For 26 years that’s been the philosophy of Dallas’ Pegasus Theatre, which performs its annual murder mystery comedy in trademarked “Living Black and White” style. This year’s show, opening at the Eisemann Center in Richardson on December…
Pure Barre is located next to Pinkberry on Greenville so yeah, I’d seen it a couple of times. I never paid any attention though because I figured it was for leggy, dancer types and I’m more of a stumpy, TV-watching type. But I happen to know one of those leggy…
Like Ebenezer Scrooge, a certain rotund, snow-haired, thrice-married GOP presidential candidate regards poor children as slackers. “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid,” Newt Gingrich told an audience at Harvard a few weeks ago. He’d like to put…
If you remember flopping on the divan in your flannels and scuffies to watch TV Christmas specials starring Perry Como, the King Sisters and the Osmonds back in the day, you’ll feel right at home at WaterTower Theatre’s Rockin’ Christmas Party. The show is a nostalgia-filled musical cheese ball, rolled…
Oh, they don’t want a lot for Christmas… just for you to lip sync your little elfin heart out on camera. But not just any lip sync: The Dallas Comedy House would very much like you to film your sync to a very specific song, and a specific version, by…
For its eighth season, Second Thought Theatre, the small-ensemble company founded by Baylor grads, will move back to where it started — or close to it. Second Thought is leaving the Addison Theatre Centre’s black box studio and relocating to 75-seat Bryant Hall, across the parking lot from Kalita Humphreys…
Theater Caps are bite-sized punch-packing capsule reviews by resident theater critic Elaine Liner. Use them as a reminder — or a teaser, if you procrastinate — of her full-length reviews in The Mixmaster’s weekly sister. There’s always humor and elegance in the shows performed at Dallas Children’s Theater by the…
Part of the fun of Dallas Theater Center’s huge production of A Christmas Carol, opening Friday night for a three-week run at Kalita Humphreys Theater, is seeing who plays the ghosts that visit Ebenezer Scrooge. In the spooky adaptation by Richard Hellesen of Charles Dickens’ immortal story of greed v…
The title of WaterTower Theatre’s revival of Rockin’ Christmas Party is missing its “g” for a reason. Throughout the two-plus hours of singin’ and dancin’, you’ll keep thinkin’ to yourself, “Gee, what does that song have to do with Christmas?” and “Gee, why are those ladies wearing Conehead wigs and…
At the Monday night Open Stage talent show in Richardson, the emcee, Russ Sharek, shows the audience the “Positivity Pill.” It’s a stuffed toy shaped like a capsule and it’s tossed at anyone who doesn’t give the performers upbeat feedback. No booing allowed here and no “keeping score” about which…
It’s a quarter to 8 on a Monday night at Open Stage, the weekly talent showcase at House of Poets in Richardson, and the incense is growing Vatican-thick. The show happens on a raised platform along one wall of an oblong banquet hall at the back of a shopping center,…
If you have to use “the Method” to act excited about seeing in-laws at your holiday gatherings, you have something in common with all the actors in Scrooge and Santa drag night after night from now till New Year’s. Sure, it’s a job for them, sometimes even one that pays…
Tish Mussey and her brother Martin grew up as army brats, moving frequently and learning that their shared love of theater gave them an identity and something to do together wherever they were. When the siblings ended up in The Colony, now with their own families, they found there wasn’t…
Theater Caps are bite-sized punch-packing capsule reviews by resident theater critic Elaine Liner. Use them as a reminder — or a teaser, if you procrastinate — of her full-length reviews in The Mixmaster’s weekly sister. It’s probably not the best idea to make a play about a cross-country road trip…
Director’s Notes documents, from planning to performance, the challenges of local artist Katie Toohil as she mounted an original, independent theatrical dance production. The last two weeks of Grieve was one of the most intense times in my entire life. There remained so much to complete and I can’t say…
Theater Caps are bite-sized punch-packing capsule reviews by resident theater critic Elaine Liner. Use them as a reminder — or a teaser, if you procrastinate — of her full-length reviews in The Mixmaster’s weekly sister. Theatre Three and its downstairs lair, Theatre Too, are on a John Bucchino kick. The…
