David Mamet wastes no time getting down to business in Glengarry Glen Ross, onstage in a ferocious production right now at Dallas Theater Center. He goes to the dark side of the real estate business. Selling worthless tracts of land in Florida—parceled into “units” with made-up Scottish names that end…
Need a smile? Say Jeeves. No butler ever butled better than the one British-born humorist P.G. Wodehouse created as deadpan comic foil for ditzy upper-crust bachelor Bertie Wooster. The characters, and several silly companions, come gloriously, hilariously to the fore in the farcical Right Ho, Jeeves, now playing as the…
In his earlier plays, Killer Joe and Bug, writer Tracy Letts plundered the troubled lives of angry brutes and paranoid meth addicts, the sort of creepsters who dabble in homemade porn, homegrown reefer and homicide. So what’s he doing wasting his time and ours with the khaki-bland problems of Man…
Wayne Hudson and his accomplice-wife Scout are the Wal-Mart Bonnie and Clyde. Dubbed the “Mall Murderers” by media, the pair has shot, stabbed and strangled their way into the home of controversial film director Bruce Delamitri. He’s the Wal-Mart Quentin Tarantino. Without the wit. When we meet these characters in…
Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. That’s Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic “musical play” Carousel. In Lyric Stage’s majestic production, directed by Cheryl Denson, the Irving Arts Center’s acoustically generous Carpenter Performance Hall fills with waves of waltzes, ballets and ballads played by a full 40-piece orchestra. A dozen violins! Three violas! And nearly…
Don’t worry about what to wear to Dallas Theater Center’s season opener, Pride and Prejudice. By the last scene, your outfit will be out of style. At least it feels that way. Three hours is a long sit at any play. Three hours of the quaint jibber-jabber of Jane Austen’s…
You’ve got to climb to the top of Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls. That’s the opener of Jacqueline Susann’s crapgasmic 1966 novel, and the first words spoken in a new Valley of the Dolls theatrical adaptation now running at Uptown Players. Transporting this immortal phrase from page…
As likable as it is, Social Security suffers from a serious case of the coots. The two-act comedy by Andrew Bergman, now onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, wants to be a smart and witty farce about three generations of mother-daughter power struggles. What it is, however, is Golden Girls…
Think universally, laugh locally. Big themes come laced with oodles of hometown references in Heaven Forbid(s)!, the biting new comedy written by and starring Marco Rodriguez, now playing at the itty-bitty Ice House Cultural Center in Oak Cliff. It’s the first new show in two years from Rodriguez’s Martice Enterprises,…
Saw a strange new play about a handsome thief named Edward whose hands are amputated by court order. New ones are transplanted onto the stumps. The convicted thief is white. The recycled mitts are brown. The thief begins channeling the thoughts of the hands’ former owner, a Dalai Lama-like religious…
The less said, the better The Boxer is. The new play by Dallas writer and Bootstraps Comedy Theater founder Matt Lyles, who also directs this production, is a clear audience favorite at the current Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center. Its brilliance lies in how it…
Enough with the meta-musicals, where are the meaty musicals? Monty Python’s Spamalot, now at the Music Hall at Fair Park, is the latest light-bite Broadway hit to make comic hash of the Broadway smash. The Producers—like Spamalot, a musical comedy based on a feature film—won a slew of Tonys clawing…
Who wouldn’t want to take Sylvia home? Talk about adorable. Young, blond, frisky—she’s every middle-aged man’s fantasy. She also has four legs, a tail and fleas. A.R. Gurney’s fluffy comedy Sylvia, currently playing at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, asks if it’s possible for a mutt to break up—or possibly save—a…
Hear that? It’s the happy hum of satisfied theatergoers enjoying a harmonic convergence of musical theater. At Fair Park you’ve got a stripped-to-the-beautiful-bones Chicago sporting a jim-dandy cast of singers and dancers—plus Lisa Rinna, a not-so-terrible TV personality. At Theatre Three you have the local premiere of Tony Kushner’s Caroline,…
Reality TV has left little to fear about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee’s once-shocking and still unsettling 1962 drama. The play is now getting a strongly acted, if technically uneven, production directed by René Moreno at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Imagine three and a half hours of out-of-control Real…
My, my, Michael York looks happy. Why shouldn’t he? He’s starring in a national tour of Camelot, getting away with sleepwalking through a role for which he’s 30 years too old. But he’s famous! He’s charming! He’s British! That appears to be enough for York and for his languid King…
He used to see plays for a living. Now Tom Sime is writing them. The former Dallas Morning News and Dallas Observer theater critic left journalism a few years ago to work full-time in professional theater. Soon Sime will oversee the first full-scale local production of one of his plays,…
What a friend she has in cheeses. Sister Elizabeth Donderstock, member of an obscure offshoot of the Amish called the “Squeamish,” is the goddess with gouda in Amy and David Sedaris’ lactose-irreverent one-act comedy The Book of Liz. Bootstraps Comedy Theater is putting on this curds-and-way-funny little play right now…
The road tour of Wicked first blew into town during the 2005 State Fair with a company that rivaled the Broadway originals for sheer gut-busting star power. The Glinda and Elphaba from that production are playing leads on Broadway right now—Kendra Kassebaum carrying on as the bubble-headed good witch in…
There’s a happy, bouncy lilt to the writing of Preston Jones and Charles Busch. Their plays are nothing alike, but, man, their use of language surely is music to the ears. In new productions of Jones’ lovely 1974 comedy Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, now playing at Contemporary Theatre of…
With friends like these—oh, boy. Two new stage productions—each disquieting, amusing and refreshingly brief—explore the absurd lengths to which some lonely souls go to find a boon companion. The surprise in both works is what happens when the relationship goes wonky. Take Lucy, a plucky 4-year-old played by adult actress…
Imagine Ben-Hur acted out on a stage the size of a twin bed and you’ve got The Big Bang. Pure madness is what it is, the funniest, sweatiest three-man musical ever to condense the history of civilization to less than an hour and a half. They start the timeline with…
