A comedy about terminal illness? That’s the ticket at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas’ production of the late Scott McPherson’s 1991 play Marvin’s Room. An absurd, off-kilter tone is established in the opening scene. Middle-aged Bessie (Cindee Mayfield) sits in her doctor’s office, patiently watching her inept physician (Nye Cooper) chase…
By comparison, King Richard III makes Macbeth look like a pussycat. As Shakespeare’s worst/best sociopath, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, romps merrily through one of the Bard’s longest plays, killing everyone who stands, sits or squats between him and the throne of England. In a classical five-act production of Richard III,…
Rooted in his signature bluesy folk-rock and branching out into all sorts of other forms, Greendale has become Neil Young’s musical kudzu. What started in 2003 as an “audio novel,” by Young’s description, already has been performed by Young on CD, DVD and in live concerts with his band Crazy…
All 103-year-olds should look as good as Major Barbara. There are lots of lines but few wrinkles in George Bernard Shaw’s three-act comedy, now running in a production full of smart young actors, and a few wise elders, at Fort Worth’s Stage West. Timely and timeless, the play asks still-relevant…
The latest out-of-town import to arrive at the Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys stage lets the audience see through walls. In Robert Hewett’s The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, actress Annalee Jefferies plays all seven characters. To transition from housewife (redhead) to gossipy neighbor (brunette) to alluring Russian…
The Unseen must be seen. Wedged into a ragged repertory of a dozen shows at WaterTower Theatre’s seventh annual Out of the Loop Festival, this 65-minute drama by Craig Wright occupies the small studio space only one more time on the fest’s closing weekend. It could and should reach a…
Pocket Sandwich Theatre gets no respect. The only for-profit theater in Dallas, the charming but grungy playhouse tucked into a corner of a two-story shopping strip on Mockingbird Lane has been pumping out low-budget entertainment for more than 25 years. They do popcorn-tossing melodramas and cheap-to-produce comedies. Actors, directors and designers…
Count on these things in most every Uptown Players production: cute guys kissing and at least one young man stripping down to scanty man-panties. There you have Uptown’s latest show, bare, a pop opera/peepshow about hot Catholic schoolboys in lust with each other. It’s a big, gay high school musical…
How sweet the sound of the other shoe dropping. All through Almost, Maine, the captivating comedy at WaterTower’s Studio Theatre in Addison, playwright John Cariani keeps gently postponing the payoff. In a series of 10-minute vignettes, couples fall in and out of love in rapid tumbles of unlikely pairings. They…
The fourth wall springs a leak in two shows now playing Dallas stages. At Risk Theater Initiative’s Slaughterhouse Five, a character resembling Kurt Vonnegut Jr., (played by T. A. Taylor) sits facing the audience to narrate his time-hopping memoir of World War II. In Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding, a Dallas…
From a chance remark overheard at a party, East Coast playwright Sarah Ruhl was inspired to create The Clean House, now playing at Fort Worth’s Stage West. It’s a gentle and oddly persuasive play—very funny too—about the relationship between women and dust, and about women’s ability to accept and forgive…
Things just got a whole lot cooler around here. At two Dallas theaters, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday are back and ready to swing. Giving remarkably convincing performances as the late, great jazz icons in separate shows, E. Faye Butler is Lady Ella and M. Denise Lee is Lady Day…
Something terrible befalls the title character in Edmond just before David Mamet’s terse little play begins. It’s not important what that terrible thing is. Mamet, as is his way, never tells. Best guesses—that Edmond’s been fired from his big job on Wall Street, that he’s had a nervous breakdown, that…
A great moment in theater can be as simple as a beam of light on an interesting face. Or it can come in the spectacle of a stage crowded with dancers whirling as music swells from a full orchestra. Dallas area stages in 2007 throbbed with memorable moments, large and…
With The Goodbye Girl, now playing at Theatre Three, it goes like this: Buy your ticket, sit down, wait four songs and fall in love. That’s exactly how long it takes for Dallas actor Gregory Lush to make his first entrance. And when he comes onstage and starts singing, dancing…
Ghosts of Christmas plays past are haunting Dallas theaters this season. So many playhouses are doing the same shows they did at the same time last year that reviewing them again feels like “OK, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties ’cause it’s cooooold out there.” That’s from…
Two new productions—Driving Miss Daisy at the Bath House Cultural Center and The Santaland Diaries at WaterTower’s Studio Theatre—affirm all the best reasons to go out to a play. Another, Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, also at the Bath House, serves as a 105-minute argument for renting…
One ghost is missing from this year’s production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at Dallas Theater Center. It is not the Ghost of Jacob Marley or of Christmases Past, Present or Yet to Come. They’re there in all their clinking, clanking glory. It is the ghost of former DTC…
The Widow Twankey is back! Theatre Britain’s annual “panto” production brings the silly old dame, played by a man in glam-drag, out front and center. This year she’s at her gawdy, bawdy best as portrayed by Dallas actor Mark Shum in Aladdin, now onstage for the hols at the KD…
The Boxer is brilliant. The locally grown one-act play that charmed audiences at last summer’s Festival of Independent Theatres is now at Dallas Children’s Theater, with the same cast and an even more polished staging by Dallas writer-director Matt Lyle. What a gem. In a lively 60 minutes, Lyle’s darling…
Everyone, audience included, visits hell in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the Stephen Adly Guirgis drama at Risk Theatre Initiative. The setting is a courtroom in purgatory. The trial could overturn the eternal damnation of the apostle who committed suicide after betraying Jesus Christ, the defense argument being, if…
We learn from failure, not from success!” wrote Bram Stoker in Dracula. If Irving’s ICT MainStage heeds that advice, director Bruce R. Coleman’s staging of the 1897 vampire saga, adapted by Seattle playwright Steven Dietz, will not have been in vain. Or vein. So much is right in the beginning…
