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…
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…
