Bad times make for good music. Woody Guthrie’s American Song, now playing at Theatre Too in The Quadrangle, celebrates the Okie balladeer who blended stories of the Great Depression with simple tunes and made them anthems of working-class America. In this warm and well-informed two-hour revue, conceived and adapted by…
With Romeo and Juliet, the problem is this: Cast seasoned actors who look a little too old for the title roles or use young ones who can pass as teenagers (Juliet’s barely 14 in the play) but might be too green to wrap their heads around the characters’ intense emotional…
Serious theater exploring the existential boundaries of the human condition, provoking deep thoughts and stirring the soul—Uptown Players’ production of Jamie Morris’ Mommie Queerest does none of that. Thank God. After months of downers and drear, we kvell in the quick quippery of Mommie Queerest, an all-male tribute to and…
Seeing Greater Tuna performed by two actors other than Joe Sears and Jaston Williams is like going to a concert knowing it’s a cover band. Even with reasonable facsimiles on the stage, you’re a little let down at not getting the real thing. Until the current production at Flower Mound…
Pocket Sandwich Theatre takes a break from its usual popcorn-throwing fluff to give audiences something better to chew on, the premiere of Death: The Musical, a new R-rated musical comedy by Dallas composer-writer Scott A. Eckert. The title might be a harder sell than Macbeth, but the show itself is…
Nuns are funny. They must be, or why would so many playwrights type so many comedies about goofy brides of Christ in black-and-white get-ups? This week there are two funny-nun shows going on: Hail Mary!, a new Tom Dudzick comedy at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre; and at Artisan Center Theater…
Take four or five of those deluded fame-seekers of American Idol’s audition episodes—the lumpenproles in tutus and tiaras who sing like they’re gargling tapioca—and you’ve got the main characters of John Guare’s hauntingly funny-sad play The House of Blue Leaves, now onstage at Theatre Arlington with a cast that never…
Too rare is the transcendent theater experience. Now there is one in And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank, onstage at Dallas Children’s Theater. In 90 minutes, this play does some extraordinary things, going beyond mere entertainment-with-a-message to offer true stories of the Holocaust told…
Calling the current production of the musical Sarah, Plain and Tall a “world premiere” is a stretch. But that’s how Dallas Theater Center is promoting its last show of the season, which is also its last new one in the 50-year-old Kalita Humphreys Theater before the move next October into…
If it weren’t for the fine quartet of older actresses in Contemporary Theatre of Dallas’ current production of Ivan Menchell’s The Cemetery Club, this sentimental sitcom of a play could easily be mistaken for Steel Magnolias: Golden Girls Edition. It’s yet another gentle walk through love, death and the bonds…
The least important theme in Alan Bennett’s wonderful play The History Boys is that a great teacher can also be a bad person. Hector, an overweight, 60ish instructor at a lower-tier English college prep for boys, is a popular eccentric who believes in the power of big ideas and the…
The stripper alone should make Patrick Marber’s play Closer a red-hot ticket. The character’s name is Alice Ayres, and in a scene in the second act, she performs a seductive dance for a man named Larry. In the debut production by Enter Stage Left, in residence at Teatro Dallas, the…
Careers of baseball players and playwrights have more in common than you might think. Both professions have major and minor playing fields. Both require a consistent string of hits to be considered successful. And the end game is elevation to the “big show” that could mean money, awards and fame…
Old television shows never die; they stubbornly live on in cable reruns, DVD boxed sets, online and now as theatrical productions. Like popular movies, from Sunset Boulevard to Shrek, that have been made over into Broadway musicals, some of TV’s best-loved series are returning repurposed as stage material. And why…
Two shows in a row, Kitchen Dog Theater has picked plays about older men having carnal relations with animals. In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, produced at KDT last fall, a well-to-do Manhattan husband fell in love and lust with a four-legged woolly mammal with big, soulful…
Goodbye, winter blues. Hello Human Female, springing from the wildly funny imagination of Texas playwright Matt Lyle, arrives as a late Valentine to the willy-nilly silliness of love among lovable misfits. In its world premiere by Audacity Theatre Lab at the tiny Ochre House Theatre next to Fair Park, Lyle’s…
Not a bad time to invest in an entertainment stimulus package. Two just-opened shows are pretty fair bets, paying off with a high percentage of laughs at the expense of a few morally bankrupt characters. At Uptown Players is the Southwest premiere of Del Shores’ The Trials and Tribulations of…
A little bit of Walton’s Mountain, a sprinkling of Horton Foote, a dash of Tennessee Williams and you’re on Last Train to Nibroc, the first play in Arlene Hutton’s charming, evocative Nibroc Trilogy. Echo Theatre is presenting all three plays in rolling repertory this month at the Bath House Cultural…
In the beginning, there was the word. And it was the playwright’s. And the actors said the word. And the audience watched and heard the word. And if the word was good, the audience clapped and stood and felt justified for spending $60 a ticket and missing Larry King. So…
Violet Sherlock’s Last Case Plenty of musicals tell the story of an ugly girl yearning to be pretty. My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, The Apple Tree, Carnival, 110 in the Shade and most recently Shrek the Musical feature ugly ducklings longing for swanhood. How they get there usually requires the…
The annual evening of folderol known as Broadway Our Way started out several years ago at Uptown Players as a tossed-together two-night fund-raiser with a cute twist. Performers from the company’s previous season’s shows would sing and dance, with the women taking on Broadway tunes written for men and the…
Death never takes a holiday in the plays of Martin McDonagh. It’s always right there in the room, or at least close by, lurking, stalking. He populates his scripts with nasty old ladies, drunken louts and bad-tempered cops—potential murderers all. Insanely funny conversations about trivial matters erupt into bitter confrontations…
