There are two fundamental rules that must remain inviolate for my 4-year-old, Max, to enjoy children’s theater. First, never allow larger-than-life animal characters to frolic in any interactive fashion with the audience: Breaking the fourth wall scares the hell out of him. And second, make certain that the running time…
One of the great issues of modern drama can best be phrased as a simple, catty question: “Why is Hedda such a bitch?” Certainly, the pioneering dramatist Henrik Ibsen was spry enough with language, structure and the subtle insertions of social conscience in Hedda Gabler to give theatergoers a thousand…
“The people’s musical returns!” trumpets a poster advertising the appearance of Blood Brothers in an English theater. It’s kind of amusing that a show written by blue-collar advocate Willy Russell as relief from the budget-busting spectacles of Andrew Lloyd Webber would wind up competing with Webber in both ticket prices…
The hugely influential 19th-century art critic John Ruskin is said to have influenced the success of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and to have earned the undying fandom of no less than Gandhi and Tolstoy. But the poor bastard is nowadays more discussed in art history classes for…
Critics reach a point in their careers when they need to be careful about heedlessly tossing out adjectives to praise a show. If we’re not paying attention, we go on autopilot and use a word such as “breathtaking” to commend a staging that floored us with its passion and quality,…
When a show has been advertised with the line “Dreams Don’t Always Come True,” you know entering the theater that you’re likely not in for a giddy romp. And yet the ultimate word-of-mouth musical Floyd Collins, given a North Texas premiere by Plano Repertory Theatre, isn’t as relentlessly downbeat as…
For the better part of two decades now, Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre has been relying on its musical ventures to finance the less commercial productions it stages. This is hardly a novel formula–it may, in fact, be the American theater’s single most reliable life preserver–except that Jubilee has distinguished itself…
The mock religious Web site www.landoverbaptist.org staged a spoof protest outside the eight-month Los Angeles run of Del Shores’ Southern Baptist Sissies. A director friend of Shores’ turned it into a 15-minute movie that was equal parts parody and extended promo for the production. The verisimilitude to real-life conservative Christian…
When British theater historian J.C. Trewin referred to Agatha Christie’s stage plays as “a Midas gift to the theater,” he was referring to commercial rather than artistic gold. The woman who remains one of the best-selling, most-translated authors in publishing history mistrusted film as a medium for her blood-soaked tales…
Saturday night, my ears rang from a boot to the forehead provided by One Good Beating, the dramatic highlight of 2001’s Festival of Independent Theatres. Theatre Quorum’s look at a grown-up brother and sister attempting to avenge childhood wounds inflicted by their poisonous father rose a little above the ranks…
On opening night of 2001’s Festival of Independent Theatres, I’m not sure that the one-act duo being performed was well-served when paired together, although a festival official informed me that it was merely an (un)lucky draw. Two theater companies performed superior usurpations of narrative and character that, witnessed back to…
Patrons who wandered into the Undermain’s basement theater for a near-sold-out Saturday-night performance of The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea were warned solemnly that the world premiere of Cherrie Moraga’s dystopian tragedy contained adult situations and nudity. The house manager informed us that audience members on previous nights had been…
If you don’t think too hard about Eighteen, the centerpiece production of Kitchen Dog Theater’s 2001 New Works Festival, this small, concentrated domestic drama will give you the kind of chills normally inspired by supernatural yarns. There’s not a drop of ectoplasm to be found in native Texan and Southern…
Flaminio La Scala’s 1611 collection of standard Italian comic theatrical setups, Scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte, features this introduction to a night of improvised performances: Let’s say there are two old men in Florence who are bitter enemies. The son of one falls in love with the daughter of the…
When you think of Communists, images of masterful sweet talkers and seducers don’t come immediately to mind. And yet the most widely read Spanish-speaking poet of the 20th century–more famous and admired, many insist, than Federico Garcia Lorca–managed to inspire both party commitment and feverish woo-pitching. On the political side,…
New York-based, Oklahoma-born playwright Clint Jeffries, who has had an artistic home with Christopher Street’s Wings Theatre Company since 1986, is far from the only country boy drawn to a major theatrical Mecca with footlights in his eyes. But he has chosen a somewhat unorthodox way to create small stage…
You’d be hard-pressed to find a better song to pull you out of the lost romance blues (or any life doldrums, for that matter) than John Kander and Frank Ebb’s The World Goes ‘Round. It is, appropriately, the tune that provides the title to a revue of the work of…
Lest you think backstage bitchery, outspoken narcissism and superficiality are just inventions for the all-male beauty contest spoof Pageant, check out the Web site that the creators of this internationally successful show have designed (www.pageantthemusical.com). They’ve devoted a page to 26 fun facts about pageant history from the years 1922…
There are deeper issues behind the identity of pseudonymous playwright Jane Martin, a Kentuckian who remains the most-produced playwright in the 25-year history of the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays. Women who’ve been accused (and vehemently deny that they are Martin) include established theater artists…
“I see myself writing in the tradition of Shakespeare and Moliere,” playwright Don Evans once told The New York Times. “I’m very much aware I come from a street tradition, but my work came about because of writers I love, like William Shakespeare.” I’m pleased to report that one of…
A co-worker who regularly attends the theater fairly recoiled when he learned that Dallas Theater Center had programmed Margaret Edson’s Wit into the final slot of the season. He had seen the New York production, and while he could note some of its admirable qualities from a safe distance, he…
Playwright Diana Son, who contributed some of the best material to last season’s TV show The West Wing, is a woman who wears her hair very short and eschews makeup. In interviews, the Korean-American writer talks about having been mistaken for a man at various times in her adult life,…
