What Hamlet says about mothers and sons, Henry IV says about fathers (and father figures) and sons. Shakespeare’s drama about medieval kings, now getting a handsome, if gimmick-strewn, production at Dallas Theater Center, presents a troubled royal son, Hal, the Prince of Wales, and his uneasy relationships with his father…
The bigger the show, the smaller the revival. Vintage American musicals keep getting make-unders on Broadway. The trend began with 2005’s Sweeney Todd, a shoestring affair imported from London that forced the cast to double as the onstage “orchestra.” Star Patti Lupone awkwardly blew into a tuba. And thus diminished,…
The season of farce is upon us. Two more big comedies have just opened for grins: Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps at Fort Worth’s Stage West and Unnecessary Farce at Pocket Sandwich Theatre. They join the still-running, lavishly funny Bach at Leipzig at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre (through September 18)…
Like so many of the plays produced at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the new one by Ed Graczyk called The Blue Moon Dancing is just Steel Magnolias by another name. Contemporary Theatre did Steel Magnolias earlier this year. It seems as if they do it every year. They put on…
When they’re up and dancing, A Bollywood Lysistrata, a new piece by Level Ground Arts in their new home at KD Studio Theatre, feels as fresh and salty-sweet as the cool Indian yogurt drink known as lassi. If only they could have danced all night. It’s the standing-around-talking parts that…
Sherlock Holmes as hottie? Theatre Three has him in actor Chuck Huber, starring as the title character in Sherlock Holmes in the Crucifer of Blood. With a seriously stylish steampunk-influenced production directed by Jeffrey Schmidt, Dallas’ oldest theater-in-the-round dares not to be square (for once). And at the center of…
The naked truth is, The Full Monty is a cock tease. You won’t see the full anything in this gently ribald musical, now onstage at Addison’s WaterTowerTheatre. The working-stiff characters who band together for a one-night-only all-male strip act promise to take it all off, but the big finale of…
Going to the annual Festival of Independent Theatres is a bit like tumbling down Alice’s rabbit hole. You jump in and hope for amusing diversions on the way to a soft landing. For four weeks, eight small theater companies, so small they don’t have their own home spaces in which…
By the time the ladies of Theatre Too’s Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage start sawing up the body of a villainous Ukrainian drug dealer named Black Dog, the strange charms of this outrageous piece of grindhouse comedy will have firmly grabbed hold of your senses. Not known for taking…
Exploding with forced fabulosity, the national tour of Dreamgirls currently at the Music Hall at Fair Park lifts the 1981 musical into the realm of high-tech spectacle. Visually, it’s a stunner. Spanning the stage are revolving walls of LED lights on designer Robin Wagner’s enormous, industrial-grid set. These become giant…
Yes, he flies. Superman, an American icon in blazing blue tights, red cape and sassy leather boots, soars into view and lands like a muscle-queen Peter Pan on the stage of the Wyly Theatre. In Dallas Theater Center’s bright, funny, downright inspiring remake of the 1966 musical It’s a Bird…It’s…
Fluids of all sorts have cameo roles in Zayd Dohrn’s soggy new play, Long Way Go Down, getting its debut production in Kitchen Dog Theater’s current New Works Festival. In the small, spare office of a Phoenix trucking outfit where most of the drama happens, buckets catch steady leaks from…
The most moving of three musicals that have just opened on Dallas stages is the little one with no orchestra, only two characters and a collection of songs, performed mostly a cappella, that never won a single Tony. It’s Black Pearl Sings!, now playing at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. More than…
“I never knew what true happiness was till I got married. By then it was too late.” Good line. And if you didn’t know you were watching The Dixie Swim Club, a comedy about five women renewing their friendship at an annual North Carolina beach weekend, you might think you…
Scarlet fever, blindness, a blizzard and a crop-killing fire hit the Ingalls family in Little House on the Prairie, The Musical. And that’s just the first act. These hearty pioneers respond to disaster after disaster in typically hearty (theater) pioneer fashion—by singing spirited ballads and engaging in thigh-slapping yeehaw dancing…
Nine innings of baseball can go three hours easy, so it’s remarkable that Most Valuable Player, a play about Jackie Robinson’s first three seasons in the majors, manages to work in spring training, a couple of World Series and an All-Star game in 70 minutes flat. The production at Dallas…
Dallas Opera’s triumphant world premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick is so un-opera in the traditional sense that it’s easier to describe it as new epic cinema in 3-D. With live actors. And lots of singing. About three hours’ worth, all aboard the Pequod in search of the mythical Great White…
“Give Them What They Want” is the first number in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and the current entertainment model of Uptown Players, the company presenting the area’s first local production of the show. Giving the Uptown audience—a mostly middle-aged, predominantly gay male crowd of dedicated theatergoers—what they want means the occasional…
The pretty girl gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop in reasons to be pretty, the third and last installment in Dallas Theater Center’s ongoing trilogy of Neil LaBute’s Beauty Plays. In the first two—The Shape of Things and Fat Pig—the good-lookers have all the power. But in pretty, directed…
Funny how these dead writers keep coughing up new plays. Shakespeare’s got one, Cardenio, confirmed by British scholars earlier this year as a script the Bard based on Don Quixote. It was produced briefly during Shakespeare’s lifetime, then lost, only to be rediscovered recently by literary sleuths who found similar…
Nothing depicts teenagers’ lives with less authenticity than the typical musical about teenagers’ lives. Think about the kids in shows like High School Musical, Hairspray, and even Grease and Bye Bye Birdie, all populated with nuance-free, dumbed-down stereotypes. You get your studs and duds, preps and debs, sluts and hoods,…
Meet the burnouts of Burnfield, USA. The young adults of Eric Bogosian’s play subUrbia, now being done by Upstart Productions at The Green Zone, have turned the curbside at their local convenience store into an ersatz salon. They hang there every night and sometimes on toward dawn, drinking, smoking and…
