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…
Squeezing Wagner’s four-opera, 17-hour Der Ring des Nibelungen down to two hours and 20 minutes leaves no room for the fire-breathing dragon. For Das Barbecü, a two-act spoof of the operas now onstage at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, composer Scott Warrender and writer-lyricist Jim Luigs do that, no problem. But instead…
For a moment in The Hollow, a toothsome Agatha Christie murder mystery now onstage at Theatre Three, it looks as if the butler did it. And what a butler. Played by the towering Chris Messersmith, this majordomo skulks around corners and looms like an ancient Lurch over his household of…
Just opened at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas is a play called Close Ties. The title is misleading, for the truth is, the connections among the members of the Frye family in Elizabeth Diggs’ two-act New England drama are terribly frayed. In CDT’s heart-tugging if sometimes too sentimental production, Bess and…
One thing about watching Hamlet, Shakespeare’s longest play: By the time the drama drags its boots into the fifth and final act, we groundlings are more than ready to see yon moody Dane die young. The sooner the better, too, because by the time this one ends, it feels as…
With a curtain time of 8:15 p.m., performances of Shakespeare Festival of Dallas’ current production of The Taming of the Shrew light up the outdoor Samuell-Grand Amphitheater just before the sun has dropped completely out of sight. Above the cool green lawn sloping up from the stage, purple streaks of…
The playbill profile of B.J. Cleveland, star of Over the River and Through the Woods and self-proclaimed “God of Local Theater and All It Entails,” offers a dedication: “For my grandparents, their parents and all the Milans–Je Mi Rodina!” Which is funny, because 1) the phrase translates into nothing (believe…
