A good production of a good play about a bad production of a bad play is the tricky part of staging Noises Off. Michael Frayn’s three-act inside joke about the delicate nuances of live theater—and what happens when absolutely everything goes awry—is getting decent laughs in a polished, if not…
Hard to tell who gets a bigger kick out of A Year With Frog and Toad—the kiddos in the seats at Dallas Children’s Theater or the big people who bring them. There’s something wonderful about a musical that so successfully entertains the inner child and fascinates the little one gazing…
Which of the following was not in an episode of the 1980s sitcom The Facts of Life: (a) Tootie announces the onset of puberty by yelling “I’m bleeding down there!”; (b) Natalie is nearly date-raped while wearing a Charlie Chaplin costume; (c) Jo catches a teacher doing cocaine; (d) Blair…
The years have been kind to The Oldest Living Graduate. The last play in Preston Jones’ Texas Trilogy holds up even better than the second in the series, Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas did a dandy Lu Ann last season. They have a not-so-dandy Graduate running…
The dog days of Dallas theater are upon us. With A Dog’s Life at Theatre Three, we have the sweetest musical comedy of the season. Up the street at Kitchen Dog Theater is the world premiere of Sick, one of the best new American plays to come this way in…
As soon as Esther, the modest black seamstress at the center of Intimate Apparel, says she’s sewn her life savings into the lining of her quilt, the countdown begins. Somebody’s going to rip that quilt apart and rip Esther off. It’s that kind of story, and she’s the kind of…
Not quite a concert, not quite a bio, not quite much of anything, Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash takes two hours of tunes the rugged “outlaw” country music legend made famous and sends them to musical rehab. Out they come on the other side of the dull-a-tron…
Something funny, sad but a little bit wonderful happens between audience and players in Rain: The Beatles Experience, the musical tribute show winding up a nearly sold-out run at the Music Hall at Fair Park. Not for a second do the four singer-musicians portraying the John, Paul, George and Ringo…
Few shows are so overdone as this one. Critics dread reviewing it again and again. Ardent theatergoers greet its title on a new season brochure with groans of disappointment. Thinking Hello, Dolly! maybe? How about Tuesdays With Morrie? Either or both. They’re always playing somewhere, these two. And like theatrical…
In the second hour of Bent, two men carry rocks, one at a time, from one pile to another. When all of them are stacked, the same stones are hoisted again, placed back in the space so carefully emptied moments before. The repetitive action of men dressed in soiled striped…
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…
