The danger in writing a witty contemporary play filled with topical references and satirical jabs at public figures is that, over time, the references grow whiskers and the public figures fade into obscurity. That’s what’s happened with George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1939 comedy The Man Who Came to…
Done wrong, a tribute show like Always…Patsy Cline could come off like one of those hokey “legends” revues packing ’em in on the main drag in Branson, Missouri. But done right, as Addison’s WaterTower Theatre is doing it now, this oversimplified country-music bio can become a classy homage to one…
If bad acting were a federal crime, Tony Curtis would be locked up in Leavenworth. In the much-ballyhooed, hooey-filled Some Like It Hot, now finishing its run at the Dallas Summer Musicals at Fair Park, Curtis does it all. Which is to say, he can’t do any of it. Can’t…
Every woman knows a “Mr. Love.” He’s the too-handsome roué who dabs too much Aramis on his neck and darts his eyes at his reflection in every shiny surface. In Karoline Leach’s 1995 play The Mysterious Mr. Love, now onstage at the Trinity River Arts Center, the title character carries…
Nobody dozes off during Blast! Several times during the high-concept marching-band event now playing at the Fair Park Music Hall, the blare of dozens of horns and the pounding of a hundred drums large and small get so loud you can feel your bones vibrating. At top volume, the noise…
Maybe we ought to rethink this outdoor Shakespeare thing. It was 40 years ago this summer that Public Theatre founder Joseph Papp moved his New York Shakespeare Festival into the just-built, open-air Delacorte Theatre in Central Park and made watching the works of the Bard a must-do event for Manhattan…
Just about everything in The Wizard of Oz at the Dallas Summer Musicals at Fair Park is like it is in the great old MGM movie we know so well. Dorothy skips down the yellow brick road in a blue gingham pinafore. Glinda the Good Witch floats into Munchkinland on…
Small-town life gets a brutal but hilarious going-over in Sordid Lives, Del Hughes’ comedy playing at the Trinity River Arts Center. Make that small-town Texas life. The kind of small Texas town where men have big bellies, women have big hair and everybody has a big mouth. This is the…
In only 70 minutes, Barbette, the new play from Kitchen Dog Theater, achieves what too few other stage works ever do: It makes art. That it manages to make art happen so quietly and with so much heart is a special, precious gift to its audience. Based on the life…
Farewell, fourth wall. Actors are talking directly to their audiences in three shows, each of which tries to dissolve the invisible barrier between performer and spectator in a different way. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the in-your-face approach just gets annoying. Such is the case with Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days,…
Only a darned good writer could turn the subject of methamphetamine addiction into a spirited comedy romp. The Abandoned Reservoir, now onstage at the Bath House Cultural Center, is evidence that Stuart Litchfield was such a writer. It’s a shame he’s not around to hear the laughter and applause. Litchfield,…
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” wrote T.S. Eliot. For 1930s poet Laura Riding, that meant stealing not rhymes but husbands, notably Schuyler Jackson, a rather shiftless sometime writer for Time magazine who was married to a plain New England farm girl named Kit. Charismatic, ego-driven Riding was the companion…
The actresses playing conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton in the musical Side Show, now on view in a fine, emotionally charged production at Theatre Three, don’t use any special tricks to achieve the illusion of being attached at the hip. Their costumes aren’t even stitched together. Julie Stirman (Daisy)…
In those old mummy movies from the 1930s, nobody could outrun the corpse. The angry and very dead 3,000-year-old pharaoh in The Mummy and its dozens of sequels and remakes traveled with a step-drag, step-drag cadence that couldn’t outpace a three-legged sloth, but somehow the creature always caught up with…
Imitation being the sincerest form of show business, Neil Simon simply imitated one of his own successful formulas with California Suite, the comedy now getting a fine go-round at the Richardson Theatre Centre. The premise–one hotel room, four different stories–already had worked in Plaza Suite, the 1968 Broadway hit set…
Some plays are timely, some plays are timeless. Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild is one of the former. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is the latter. And in productions of each, currently onstage at Kitchen Dog Theater and Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District house, respectively, the reason why timeless works better is…
Quick, quote a famous line from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Don’t worry. Nobody can. Among the Bard’s works, this five-act tragedy is one of the least quotable, and it is performed less often even than Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens. Probably for good reason. This hasn’t stopped the Kitchen Dog Theater…
Big news: Big Daddy isn’t such a bigot after all. That’s one of several important revelations to be found in WaterTower Theatre’s breathtaking new production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where the emphasis shifts away from “Maggie the Cat” and onto the other feuding family members…
Back in 1982, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? played for only five performances at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre before it was shuttered as a critically panned flop. But that wasn’t the end of the show. Over the next 20 years, James Quinn and Alaric Jans’ lighthearted musical about…
Rock Baptist of Houston, setting for David Rambo’s trenchant comedy God’s Man in Texas now at Theatre Three, isn’t so much a place of worship as a stained-glassed theme park. Inside the fictional “largest Baptist church in the world” are restaurants, snack bars, a bowling alley and gym, dinner theater,…
Lie back and think of England. That’s the advice Victorian-era mothers used to whisper to just-married daughters for coping with their wifely duties in the bedroom. It’s also a good tip for anyone burdened with a ticket to The Countess, the new production at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre. This turgid…
Under the harsh glare of an overhead lamp, actress Amanda Denton leans forward over a small table, peers up at an unseen interrogator and asks, “Should I just speak? Is that OK? ‘Cause I got to sort of ease into it, you know?” With dull, stringy hair and eyes as…
