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…
Look at James and the Giant Peach through the eyes of a 5-year-old and you’ll see a cute play about a sad British orphan boy who grows a big piece of fruit, makes friends with giant bugs and lives happily ever after in New York City. A super-sized stage adaptation…
Wendy Wasserstein wrote An American Daughter more than a decade before Hillary Rodham Clinton’s election to the Senate and her push toward the presidency, before Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House. Condoleezza Rice, as the newly appointed Stanford University provost, wasn’t yet a major political power player in 1993,…
Finally, Dallas Theater Center does August Wilson. Only took them 20 years to get around to it. That’s about how long Wilson’s work has been part of the American theater conversation. Better late than never. Fences, which just opened in an astonishingly well-acted production at DTC, is one of the…
Cara Statham Serber, Megan Kelly, Patty Breckenridge, Stacey Oristano and Sara Shelby-Martin crowd the top shelf of Dallas’ professional musical comedy performers. So it’s heaping helpings of fun watching them wallow around in the bargain bin bit of entertainment called The Great American Trailer Park Musical, now sweating up the…
When Hair and its hirsute cast of young hippies hit off-Broadway 40 years ago, the American theater establishment reacted with finger-in-light-socket shrieks. Boston banned it. Major critics dismissed it. Patrons paying a top ticket price of $2.50 complained of its “deafening” pop-rock score and deplored its profanity and sexual content…
The box of Kleenex on each table is the tip-off. Shadowlands, the latest production at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, is a four-tissue romance about an unlikely couple and the deep love they share only when one of them is dying. The story’s a heartbreaker to the end, so why is…
If a word of Moonlight and Magnolias, the comedy now on the big stage at Dallas Theater Center, is true, then the movie version of Gone With the Wind could have ended up as The Da Vinci Code of 1939. Ron Hutchinson’s play suggests—no, it insists—that early in production, producer…
Great casting makes great theater. For The Miracle Worker to work as well as it does in Dallas Children’s Theater’s current production, it’s not enough just to find a young actress who can fling herself into the furniture portraying blind and deaf Helen Keller as a child. The role of…
We know Shakepeare’s Hamlet for its famous brace of be’s, as in the title character’s existential wondering re: “to” or “not to.” Charlotte Jones’ gentle, witty and enthralling play Humble Boy takes the bare bones of Hamlet, updates the location to a pretty cottage in the Cotswolds, makes the troubled…
For its first 20 minutes, Democracy painstakingly documents events surrounding the 1969 election of left-leaning politician Willy Brandt to the post of chancellor of West Germany’s democratic parliament. If that sentence bores you down to your lederhosen, just wait till you hear what’s in the rest of this 150-minute drama…
A bad review can be murder. So let’s establish right now that actor-writer Kurt Kleinmann and his merry band of Pegasus Theatre players are first-rate, top-notch, good-looking, love-their-shoes artistic geniuses who deserve every kind adjective, gilded accolade, naked statue and freebie-stuffed goody bag their profession allows. Kiss, kiss, hug, hug…
For nearly a decade, Dallas theaters benefited from an unlikely patron saint: Chuck Norris. With his CBS action series Walker, Texas Ranger, shot in North Texas from 1993 to 2001, Norris employed many a local actor to stand on the receiving end of his title character’s faked karate fan-kicks. Regular…
Part Christmas pageant, part tent revival, Jubilee Theatre’s jubilant Black Nativity could make a heathen care about the reason for the season. So full of the spirit are these heavenly hosts—a cast of 11 actor-singers, including Jubilee stalwarts Robert Rouse and Janice L. Jeffery—that when the production in the 147-seat…
Holy, holy, moly. Go to WaterTower Theatre, if you dare, to witness the “world premiere” of Happy Holi-divas!, a craptacular sleigh ride of Christmas-themed claptrap that will jingle-jangle you into a headache that goes pah-rum-pah-pum-pum on the top of your skull. In one two-hour musical revue, collaborating writers James Paul…
That fat Christmas tree in the parlor is the first hint that things aren’t exactly kosher in the Levy/Freitag family. In Alfred Uhry’s light and likable play The Last Night of Ballyhoo, set in 1939 Atlanta, the Levys and Freitags celebrate the Nativity, hold Easter egg hunts and aren’t exactly…
We wear the chains we forge in life. Link by link their weight increases until at last the burden is so great it drags us down into the grave. As a Christmas message, this one is sort of “open vein, insert tinsel.” But it is the lesson taught in Charles…
Ear-bruising vocals and eye-stinging costumes are no strangers to Theatre Three. But with Glorious! this impecunious 45-year-old theater in the Quadrangle near downtown finally grabs hold of a show that demands those things. Talk about a perfect fit. In song and story, Glorious! tells of the silly, sad and very…
Revenge is for suckers,” says Henry Gondorff, Paul Newman’s character in The Sting. Among con artists the rule is you get stung, you move on. Don’t try to get even. Because if the grifter is good, you’ll end up getting taken all over again. That’s just about what happens to…
