How far will a man go to win back his own soul? That question drives the drama of two new productions, Jubilee Theatre’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Lyric Stage’s Cabin in the Sky. Each tells the story of a troubled man who finds himself driven to the hinges…
With Paul Rudnick’s Valhalla, the Uptown Players plunge right into the sticky-sweet center of a gooey comic confection. This company specializes in gay-themed shows, and if this one were any gayer, Elton John could wear it, Tom Cruise could sue it and Liza Minnelli could marry it. Playwright Rudnick is…
She’s fat. No, really. But she’s OK with it. Just about as OK as any big girl can get in a thin-obsessed world. Question is, is he OK being the thin guy with the chubby chick? That’s the simple but strikingly profound premise of Fat Pig, a small play about…
The message of Women and Horses and a Shot Straight From the Bottle is, “Mamas, do let your babies grow up to be cowgirls.” The play by Los Angeles playwright Mary F. Casey is getting its world premiere production–and a strong one in most respects–at Echo Theatre at the Bath…
A great many angels may comfortably waltz on the head of a pin, but putting 20 actors and four musicians on the pint-sized stage at the Flower Mound Performing Arts Theatre for the musical City of Angels spells claustrophobia. How small is this place? Just 60 seats are jammed into…
Like Willy Loman, Classical Acting Company’s Death of a Salesman aspires to greatness and comes up well short of expectations. Arthur Miller’s 1949 drama is the heaving granddaddy of American tragedies. The play demands so much from its actors, designers and director that if anyone isn’t up to the task,…
Without actress Trista Wyly, the new show at the Pocket Sandwich Theatre would be just another ho-hum, pleasant little trifle. High art isn’t this venue’s specialty. Here it’s low-brow comedy and melodrama most of the year, with the audience invited to toss popcorn at hissing villains and to sing old-timey…
Funny what a hot day and cold booze will bring out in people. Some hard truths, for one thing. And in James McLure’s paired one-acts, Lone Star and Laundry and Bourbon, now playing for the second time in two years at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the combination of humidity and…
Perhaps the saddest aspect of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s autobiographical 1985 play about the first wave of AIDS deaths, is that it doesn’t feel like a museum piece. If only it did. Two and a half decades into the epidemic that has claimed millions of lives worldwide, Acquired Immune…
Once upon a time there were two musicals that began with the words “Once upon a time.” Into the Woods, now at WaterTower Theatre in Addison, and Brooklyn the Musical, on a national tour stop at the Music Hall at Fair Park, are tuneful fairy tales with twists (and shouts)…
That devil, always messing with the details, like a naughty kitten who won’t be deterred from pawing a flower arrangement. With the slightest curious swipe of the paw, the whole thing comes crashing down. It’s much like what happened during the first weekend of this year’s Festival of Independent Theatres,…
Mamma Mia!, defying critical drubbings for half a decade, has been called a Twinkie of a musical. But that’s an insult to spongy Hostess snack cakes that have stood the test of time. Think of it as more of a theatrical baklava: layers of tissue-thin story line piled one atop…
What fools these mortals be. And what fun the revival of Randy Tallman and Steven Mackenroth’s rock comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Musical, now alternating through the summer with a more conventional Tempest at Shakespeare Dallas’ outdoor East Dallas venue. It’s been some 30 years since this version of…
Less is more entertaining in the perversely spare little oddity called Thom Pain (based on nothing), playing in the intimate Bryant Hall at Dallas Theater Center. Clocking in under an hour, Will Eno’s one-man one-act unfolds in a nearly bare space (just a red chair nobody sits in and a…
The day after seeing Stanton’s Garage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, I visited an aunt and uncle who are up in years. They’d just been out in 100-degree heat to have their 1994 Toyota Camry inspected, and it had been an ordeal. The car has only 38,000 miles on it…
You could call The Illusion a comedy. You could call ipecac an after-dinner liqueur. That doesn’t make those descriptions accurate. The Illusion is Dallas Theater Center artistic director Richard Hamburger’s bitter dose of theatrical medicine after the tasty fun of Hank Williams: Lost Highway, a jukebox musical audiences loved so…
Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning drama now playing at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, tells a “What if?” story. Several, in fact. What if a major league baseball player–not just any player but a superstar–announces in the middle of a winning season that he’s gay? And what if the team needs…
The Steel Magnolias are in bloom again. Robert Harling’s all-woman 1987 play, full of sap, sass and silliness, is a favorite of regional theaters large and small. Despite its hokey writing and its jolting second-act turn from light comedy to weepy tragedy, it’s a popular, versatile piece. Like Southern women’s…
Ever sat through a show thinking you’ve seen and heard it all before? The derivative tunes, the hackneyed lyrics. The creative duo Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart had–too many times–before deciding a few years ago to take out some comic revenge by writing the four-actor off-Broadway hit The Musical of…
Among the six actors in Nickel and Dimed, now playing at Kitchen Dog Theater, only the lead, Kristina Baker, is a member of the Actors’ Equity Association. That means something in this show that it might not in others. Nickel and Dimed is based on journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s nonfiction bestseller…
Miss Great Plains, Bonnie Louise Cutlett, looks as shaky as a lamb headed for slaughter. She steps forward during the “talent” round of the make-believe beauty competition called Pageant, now onstage at the Uptown Players, and shyly declaims her painfully original poem: “I am a handful of dirt! When you…
Funny how two shows about feeling bad turn out to be the feel-good musicals of the year so far. They’re all about heartache and despair and what it’s like when you’re so lonesome you could cry. And by doggies, if you don’t walk out of the things at the end…
