In Dallas theater, 2008 was the year Jersey Boys jerked audiences to their feet at Fair Park, an all-drag Facts of Life became the must-see hit of the summer and William Ayers’ son, playwright Zayd Dohrn, premiered his 9/11 paranoia comedy, Sick, at Kitchen Dog Theater. It was the year…
As the Tina Fey of the 17th century, Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz wrote sly comedy that by all accounts cracked up audiences in the parlors and palaces of Mexican viceroys and Spanish nobility. Her works for the stage made light of then-popular cloak-and-dagger love triangles and boldly satirized…
What a shame that Ebenezer Scrooge didn’t have a gentleman’s gentleman like Jeeves at his side. Scrooge’s forced march to personal redemption might not have been necessary, and his earlier years would have been less wasted and considerably more fun. Jeeves’ employer, society gadabout Bertie Wooster, certainly seems to enjoy…
In a cage match, Crumpet the Elf could kick the cranberries off Ebenezer Scrooge and still have the energy to stomp Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Christmas Past. Don’t mess with Crumpet, the nom de Noel of writer David Sedaris. His mean and funny chronicle of time served as…
Ignorance, poverty, greed, forgiveness—the themes of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol are particularly relevant at this moment. What makes a classic a classic is that it has something to say to every generation, and though the annual production at Dallas Theater Center is almost identical to last year’s—including the return…
Seesawing between vicious satire and fawning tribute, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant offers a disarmingly funny lesson in the finer points of Dianetics. Directed by Jaime Castañeda and performed by eight cute kid actors at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, the show takes a mere 55 minutes and 11…
Just in time for the holiday season comes a play about a man having sex with a goat. Leave it to Kitchen Dog Theater, never ones for plum-pudding entertainment, to plop Edward Albee’s unnerving The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in our midst while everyone else is going with tinsel…
On November 4, Topdog/Underdog became a period piece. Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer winner about black brothers named Lincoln and Booth—their father’s idea of a joke and Parks’ method of foreshadowing their fate—is only 7 years old. But in our post-election Age of Re-Enlightenment, the play’s nihilistic view of the thwarted status…
A neon portrait of its composer-lyricist smiles down on Make Me a Song: The Music of William Finn, now playing in WaterTower Theatre’s studio space. Bald, bearded and over 50, Finn isn’t a pretty man in the flesh, much less in neon light, but he sure writes pretty tunes. In…
Lower your expectations a notch for Theatre Three’s production of the 2005 hit Broadway musical The Light in the Piazza. That way you won’t be too disappointed at the less-than-sumptuous staging of the romantic, near-operatic 16-song suite by composer-lyricist Adam Guettel (book by Craig Lucas). You might even be pleasantly…
No single character represents The Good Negro in Tracey Scott Wilson’s explosive new play, getting its world premiere at Dallas Theater Center before a transfer to New York’s Public Theater. The title is a throwback to an old phrase used by Southern folk for blacks who didn’t threaten the white…
When Jerry Russell plays the lead, that’s reason enough to see the show, even when that show is On Golden Pond, Ernest Thompson’s soggy 1979 dramedy about the irritations of growing old. Several other actors share the stage with Russell in the current production of the play at Contemporary Theatre…
Nobody in the theater intentionally puts on a “steaming turd of a play,” says Sylvia Glenn, one of two actress-characters in the showbiz-based comedy Legends. Well, actually, in the case of this script, they did. Until Uptown Players, the Oak Lawn theater company, got their clever little mitts on it,…
Once upon a time there was a writer named Katurian. Full name Katurian K. Katurian. His parents had a sick sense of humor, he explains to the men interrogating him police-state style. The cops, Ariel and Tupolski, are not amused. Ariel, the hothead, brandishes an electrical contraption with which he…
Merely by chance, Defiance, a snappy 2006 drama by Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley, and A Soldier’s Play, the 1982 Pulitzer winner by Charles Fuller, are running at the same time at two Dallas theaters, Theatre Three and the new African American Repertory Theater, respectively. The serendipitous scheduling allows playgoers…
Scruffy but beautiful kids singing and dancing their angry, aching hearts out against graffiti-scrawled walls of Manhattan tenements—could be Rent, could be West Side Story. The shows have a lot in common, starting with how brilliantly they update a couple of classics. Rent is based on La Bohème; West Side…
Maybe the blue-hairs in the audience didn’t see it coming. Or, then again, maybe they did—it’s not as if The Who’s Tommy maintains a reputation as a production tailor-made for the older theatergoing crowd. So, surely, the seemingly sedate audience attending last Saturday night’s preview performance of the Dallas Theater…
If it were produced the way its characters intended, The Big Bang would fill a big stage with 312 actors, 6,000 costumes, 302 “prosthetic devices” and a budget somewhere north of $83 million. But in the riotously funny production back for a second go-round at tiny Theatre Too, what we…
In Zanna, Don’t! every kid has two mommies. Or two daddies. Being gay is the norm, and heteros are closeted in the candy-colored, bully-free, over-the-rainbow world invented by writer-composer-lyricist Tim Acito in his 2003 musical. At Uptown Players, director Coy Covington has picked a young, attractive eight-member ensemble to create…
Oh, what a night. A great big Broadway smash called Jersey Boys hits the Music Hall at Fair Park and suddenly everything is all right again. Soaring on tunes about love, youth and yearning, this show flies right to the heart of what musical theater, big or small, should do…
Two plays, one cast of characters. That’s the tricky problem of House and Garden, the simultaneous double bill of Alan Ayckbourn comedies currently running 14 actors gloriously ragged on the two stages at Theatre Three. Upstairs, the House residents, dashing around a rambling pile of bricks in the British countryside,…
With its Romeo and Juliet-inspired plotline about a troubled romance between teenagers from competing cliques, with its soaring love songs, its bold choreography evolving from the natural athleticism of the young cast and its timelessness as a piece of classic American musical theater, it’s a show every caring parent should…
