By keeping the best character offstage, Ponzi, the new play by Elaine Romero getting its first production at Kitchen Dog Theater, perpetrates its own sly little scam on the audience. We never see “Jack,” a much talked-about investment guru who guarantees an 8.5 percent return and accepts only those clients…
Last night I laced up my bustier, put on my sequin thong and headed off to Pole Dance Class. Turns out no one really dresses that way. (No body glitter or Champagne room either. Gasp.) As a matter of fact, it was shockingly tame and I mean that in the…
More than anything, Aaron Kozak’s two-act play The Birthday Boys is about what mean little boys big men can be, even when they’re big, bad Marines. Onstage at the Texas Theatre through Sunday, May 29, the play, also directed by Kozak, is a study in what happens to men under…
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. American Idol has named its latest winner, Scotty “Lockemdoors” McCreery, but don’t feel too bad…
Two blond, big-haired, big-boobed icons stare down on the action in the musicals Rock of Ages and 9 to 5. In Rock of Ages, whose Broadway tour is now at the Winspear Opera House, the guardian angel is Angelyne, the odd Mae West-like creature whose pneumatic cleavage once decorated billboards…
One Thirty Productions is selling out the house at the Bath House Cultural Center right now with the world premiere of its new comedy, The Mystery of Miz Arnette. The play by Ronnie Claire Edwards and Alan Bailey is set in the days of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, the 1930s,…
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. A talking pig opens the show The Butcher, the dark new musical written and directed…
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 a playwright, getting a new play “up on its feet” is the first step…
Pablo Francisco, master of the movie-trailer-guy voice, is coming through Arlington this weekend, so his press folks generously made him available for an interview the other day. He was quite nice, and is a pretty skilled impressionist, and I suspect he works very hard to put on a show his…
Three intriguing trends emerged during a week of seeing new plays at small playhouses: the simple but stunning effect of actors’ faces lit with tiny handheld flashlights; plots about murders in dark environs; and animals as pivotal characters (a monkey in one show, a pig in another). Some strange and…
Choreographer Kelly Devine is all too aware what happens when you Google her. “I have to tell everyone at the first rehearsal of a show that I am NOT the porn star,” she says. Same name, way different career paths. These days the non-porn Kelly Devine is in big demand,…
Gotta be honest, Bobsky over on Unfair Park and I (the newest blog editor on the block) have been Indian leg wrestling for some prime pieces of art and culture blog real estate, but today, well we’ve decided to divide and conquer some big announcements. Big announcements like the release…
The Texas Theatre began screening the Dallas TV series at the end of March, but this week, the new-found tradition ended abruptly — with a voicemail, two faxes, and two emails from Warner Bros. ordering theater employees to “cease and desist” the screenings because of copyright laws. The Texas Theatre…
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 is one visually stunning image in UTD professor Thomas Riccio’s new play blahblah, now…
Turnaround time from Broadway to Dallas is getting shorter. The AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Lexus Broadway Series has just added the current Lincoln Center and West End hit play War Horse to its 2012-’13 season at the Winspear Opera House. The play, currently up for five Tony Awards, has become…
If things are unusually quiet on some local stages right now, it’s because most of the biggest, baddest voices in Dallas musical theater are singing like mad in Broadway Our Way, the annual fundraising revue at Oak Lawn’s Uptown Players. The cast is an all-star lineup of area divas and…
Flamenco is on fire in this town starting May 11 at Central Market stores as part of their Pasaporte Espana event celebrating the food and culture of Spain. Who knew that flamenco, the sexy Spanish dance with gypsy roots, has been building a big following here over the past five…
Comedian Mike Epps, known for his roles in The Hangover, Friday After Next and new flick Jumping the Broom, was performing to a full house at Grand Prarie’s Verizon Theater on Friday night when things got not-so-funny. A few minutes into his stand-up act a plainclothes peace officer swept across…
Life may be a cabaret, old chum, but Cabaret onstage is not Cabaret the 1972 Bob Fosse movie. The sprawling, super-sized Cabaret that just opened at the Dallas Theater Center downtown is its own animal, an irresistibly sexy beast, even when it’s indulging in wretched excess and heavy-handed messages. Get…
In the geometry of a love triangle, the three sides are rarely equal. Somebody has to be the hypotenuse, loving the wrong person, giving too much or too little. Red Light Winter, the steamy three-character play by Adam Rapp that just opened a scorching-good production at Addison’s Second Thought Theatre,…
With a little help from her friends, the title character in Theatre Nouveau 47’s silly, sometimes thrilling Alice in Wonderland and Other Hallucinations takes a high-flying tumble down the rabbit hole. Using the dreamlike, no-frills adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s stories by Andre Gregory and The Manhattan Project, the little company…
Bring on the Mamet. Cue up some Neil LaBute. Somebody, quick, stage something full of cussin’ and screwin’ and gettin’ all nekkid. A month into the ongoing Horton Foote Festival on local stages, the surfeit of antimacassars and rocking chairs in these folksy, G-rated works is wearing me to a…
