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. Once again, Irving’s Lyric Stage has found gold in an old, rarely done American musical…
There is a fiddler and there is a roof in Rags, the 1986 musical getting a splendid revival at Irving’s Lyric Stage. But those aren’t the only things it has in common with that other piece of American musical theater featuring Russian Jews belting show tunes. The books for Rags…
The smaller roles and the actors who play them are the reasons to see To Kill a Mockingbird, now playing at the Wyly Theatre in a Dallas Theater Center production. Anastasia Muñoz, playing both the judgmental “Miss Stephanie” and the rape-accuser Mayella Ewell, is so good you probably won’t realize…
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. For years we’ve waited for veteran Dallas actress Sally Soldo to get a solid starring…
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. Oh, girl, we gotta talk. Actually, we gotta be quiet while Haley Walker talks to…
Two good Dallas actresses are getting their due in a pair of shows obsessed with courtship, marriage and the whole damn thing called love. One play will make you feel good about all that. The other won’t, but it does afford its star, Sally Soldo, the sweetest role she’s had…
Dallas actor and painter Aidan Langford rolls like a rock star. He has a driver to chauffeur him to and from the theaters where he’s performing. His agent is busy fielding offers for acting and modeling gigs. At home, he has someone cooking and serving the meals he likes. Being…
Have a hot idea for a play? Start typing. Deadlines are fast approaching for several local playwriting competitions and not a few national ones. Scripts as short as 10 minutes are wanted by some contests. Others offer large cash prizes for full-length plays. The secret to winning one of these?…
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. Thanks to some fine acting, the dry civics class taught by Jon Marans’ play The…
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. To see the next generation of hot theater artists in Dallas, try to catch one…
What would an Uptown Players production be without a naked man in it? Its core audience, gay middle-aged men who flock to Uptown’s gay-themed musicals and plays, seems to appreciate it. And really, who doesn’t? More nudes is good news. The actor in the altogether in The Temperamentals is Gregory…
For Spring Awakening to work its magic, it needs young performers who look hot, sing hotter and radiate sexuality with the heat of a thousand suns. At Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, where the first local production of the Tony-winning musical is now running, the temperature’s rising. It’s exciting to see this…
In a big cast of hot young actors, two of the stars of WaterTower Theatre’s current production of Spring Awakening are sizzling standouts: Adam Garst, a 2010 Baylor theater grad in only his second role on a local stage, and Kayla Carlyle, who’s been acting and singing professionally in Dallas…
We’re back here with another installment of our local comedy series, First Times Are Funny. This time around we’ve put local Andy Franklin on the hotseat — partly in anticipation of tonight’s Stand-Upish Evening with Franklin, Jude Sutton and Dante Martinez at the Dallas Comedy House, and partly because we…
If there’s anyone we’d like to see be funny for a continuous 48 hours, it’s Dallas actor and improv comic Jeff Swearingen. He’s a funny guy on and off a stage, but especially on. And starting at 8 p.m., Friday, October 7, he’s going to try to be funny and…
The show is set in New York in the ’50s. The original Broadway production was in 1957. But sitting in the Music Hall at Fair Park last night, I felt sad at how much the heart of West Side Story still rings true today. Sure, you don’t find many gangs…
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. If you’re worried about hearing all of Shakespeare’s timeless poetry in an outdoor production of…
Director’s Notes documents, from planning to performance, the challenges of local artist Katie Toohil as she mounts an original, independent theatrical dance production. Well, it’s time for rehearsal! We hold rehearsal in three separate spaces: SPACE – Mixed Arts Collaborative, Tranquilo and Move Studio. First, please allow me a moment…
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. We expect nudity in Hair. That’s what made the “tribal love-rock musical” shocking in 1968…
Outdoor theater offers scant opportunity for subtlety, but Dallas Shakespeare’s current Hamlet, performed to audiences perched on parched grass at Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre, is overacted with such scorched-earth intensity, you worry it might spark a wildfire. From his first big speech as Hamlet — “O that this too too solid flesh…
Playwright Sarah Ruhl knows how to construct plays. Focus tightly on a topic — a crime, a scandal, some scurrilous bit of history. Then follow a Law & Order-style template of revelations and crises up to a semi-shocking finale. She does exactly this for In the Next Room, or the…
We’ve seen old Scrooges and fat Scrooges and bearded ones and bald-headed ones. Now for Dallas Theater Center’s annual staging of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, we’ll get to see a tall, good-looking one. And three other lanky chaps in the other major male roles. As Scrooge, it’s Kurt Rhoads,…
