Poignant ugliness pervades The Life, the tuneful musical about prostitutes and pimps. The show is now onstage at the Trinity River Arts Center in an eye-popping regional premiere produced by the Uptown Players. The year is 1980. The place is pre-Disneyfied 42nd Street. Under the glow of porn theater marquees,…
Put on a show called The Wild Party and it darn well better be. Anything less is like inviting hungry friends to a smorgasbord and serving them TV dinners. For a few minutes at the beginning of The Wild Party they’re throwing over at Theatre Three, there are appetizing hints…
Based on the 1996 movie, The Spitfire Grill serves up theatrical comfort food set to a pleasant, bluegrassy score by James Valcq and Fred Alley. The six-voice, seven-character musical, now running at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, is as warm and wholesome as a plate of home-cooked meat loaf and gravy. Predictable,…
Playing a character named The Maniac, actor Robert Dorfman calmly announces to the audience at Dallas Theater Center that he will serve as the “tour guide” through the zigs and zags of Dario Fo’s political satire Accidental Death of an Anarchist. That’s an understatement. Moments after the lights go up…
Mention Waiting for Godot and you will often get the sigh and the eye roll. Oh, that old thing. What is it about anyway? What does it mean? It’s weird. It’s long. It makes no sense. The eye-rollers do have a point. Godot playwright Samuel Beckett provides a pretty accurate…
Producing live theater isn’t a crapshoot. It’s a poker game. You have to bet big to win big. But a big payoff in regional and community theater usually means just breaking even. Few companies end up in the chips during a season. More often, they lose their puffy shirts. Even…
Dallas theatergoers can be aggressively vocal with their opinions. Some audience members open their gobs and offer audible reviews of a show while a performance is in progress. This sort of behavior may be appropriate at a gladiator ring or topless revue, but it is generally frowned upon at an…
Somewhere Lawrence Welk is smiling. This holiday season there’s ah-one and ah-two oldies musical revues on the boards, each offering Welkified close-harmony classics and G-rated tributes to jukebox eras gone by. Forever Plaid at Plano Repertory Theatre weaves pop hits from the ’50s and early ’60s into a threadbare story…
Bad things happen in trailer parks. Between tornados, they’re magnets for human mayhem. Any episode of Cops finds a squad car rolling into some trailer park where a half-drunk, goggle-eyed good-for-nothing will be escorted in cuffs out of an aluminum double-wide as his teenage girlfriend sobs in the background, snot-smeared…
Disturbing, daring, exceedingly funny, The Danube takes dark, unexpected turns. This fascinating one-act, now onstage in a sharply directed and well-acted production at Kitchen Dog Theater, begins with a deceptively conventional theatrical setup: Two men at a cafe table in 1938 Budapest chat amiably about weather, clean streets and movies…
Each scene in The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild, now onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, is introduced with a cutesy caption projected on a screen. “Somewhere in Wyoming,” it’ll say in white Courier font on a black background, or “Busted flat in Babylon.” Tennessee Williams first used this…
Beneath the jagged scars on the heaving chest of Dr. Frankenstein’s scary monster beats the heart of a true romantic. Just whose heart it is–or used to be–we can’t be sure. The giant creature is a crazy quilt of random body parts stitched together by a mad scientist and brought…
‘Tis pity Mother is a whore. That’s the theme of George Bernard Shaw’s drawing-room drama Mrs. Warren’s Profession, now getting a sprightly production at Theatre Three. Mother is Kitty Warren, wealthy, middle-aged owner of a chain of bawdy “private hotels” across Europe. Her adult daughter, Vivie, has been kept in…
In Kiss of the Spider Woman, the haunting Kander and Ebb musical now running at the Trinity River Arts Center, two men share a tiny prison cell in Argentina. Molina (Donald Fowler) is doing three years for sex with an underage boy. The ironically named Valentin Paz (Skie Ocasio) has…
Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins takes aim at the American dream and blows it to smithereens. The strangely hypnotic musical, now onstage in an excellent production at Quad C Theatre at Collin County Community College, imagines a surreal reunion of four killers of presidents and five who tried. Existing together on a…
At a recent performance of Hamlet at the Dallas Theater Center, the temperature inside the Kalita Humphreys Theater was so cold the ushers were doubling as Sherpas. They handed out small fuzzy wraps to ticket-holders who hadn’t anticipated subzero chill. At intermission, they short-roped half-frozen audience members back up the…
Here’s one way to tell if a production is good. Say the curtain goes up at 8 p.m. If the first time you check your watch the little hand is near the 9, you’re in luck. You’ve been swept into the acting and the story of the play and everything’s…
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is every inch the rock musical Rent tried to be and wasn’t. That Hedwig also is a campy drag act, a subversive sex comedy, a witty philosophical allegory based on Plato’s Symposium and a nostalgic tribute to feathery Farrah hair of the 1970s makes it…
You have to have some big set of scones to rewrite William Shakespeare’s longest, most famous play. So here’s some advice for Dallas writer-composer-actor-director Scott Eckert, who has done just that with Lesson 2: Hamlet: Get fitted for an extra large codpiece, sirrah; you have succeeded at making the Bard…
Twin beds or no, Rob and Laura Petrie danced a lot of bedroom bossa nova out there in New Rochelle. In those tight capri pants and pointy little slippers, darling Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) embodied the Hefneresque vision of the suburban ’60s sex kitten. The Dick Van Dyke Show somehow…
In one boffo two-hour show, Pico de Gallo, now playing at the Ice House Cultural Center in Oak Cliff, the tiny Martice Enterprises acting troupe delivers more sassy, funny, provocative entertainment than many local theaters do with big budgets and huge productions in a whole season. Without even a stage…
If the comedy High School Hellcats in Heels were ice cream, it would be cherry bubble gum with licorice chips. If it were a sweater, it would be fuzzy pink angora over a pointy D-cup. And if it really were a B-movie from the 1950s, it would star Mamie Van…
