Playwright-novelist-children’s author-film director Phillip Ridley is one of those multi-hyphenated artists who believe that the message transcends the medium or, plainly put, that a compelling story is paramount in every field in which he works. He does more than just “dabble” in all these professions. He understands that the tools…
One prominent stage director in town confessed to me that he found Blood Bondage, the quasi-evangelical vampire saga that marked ProgreXssive Arts’ first full production last year, perversely enthralling and funny. Any show that climaxes with a battle between an evil mentor bloodsucker with an English accent and a charismatic…
Like most institutions that seek to divert children, Dallas Children’s Theatre is serious about mixing entertainment and edification. Surely one reason parents purchase theater tickets is to counterbalance the perceived sugary sleaze of American pop culture with exposure to “finer things” like the stage. But like most of its peers,…
A few years back, when Edward Albee spoke at the Dallas Museum of Art, he set aside a very special few minutes to heap vitriol on the profession of theater criticism and those wannabe artists who flail away with ink-stained claws at the accomplishments of others. His sentiments were hardly…
It’s inevitable that Theatre Three’s production of Art would be greeted with high expectations by those of us who saw the December 1999 touring production that Dallas Summer Musicals brought to the Majestic Theatre. With its sometimes vicious wit and uncomfortably recognizable close-up of the inequalities and manipulations of three…
“Do you know what a wild bird’s tongue looks like?” a caged Evie (Sue Birch) asks her despairing and restless daughter Maxine (Susan Sergeant). Evie’s describing a secret trauma that I won’t reveal in this review. “Black, flattened, moving splinters. And the sounds they make with tongues like that. Horrible.”…
I haven’t been too keen on Dallas Theater Center artistic director Richard Hamburger’s leviathan takes on musicals (although anything performed in that aircraft hangar known as the Arts District Theater has got to be stretched to fit), but I’ve adored his similar outsized approach to classical works. Memories of Hamburger’s…
Over my five years-plus stint as a theater critic in this town, actor after actor has told me that after the experience of directing themselves in a play, they’d never do it again. (Having seen some of the results of this overburdening of theatrical responsibilities, I have been tempted to…
In a chat between the two acts of the brand-new musical Fat Freddy’s, Rudy Eastman defused the notion that such bawdy, rollicking material is guaranteed to graze on sold-out houses and fatten his company through the rest of a more adventurous season. The artistic director of Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre–who…
Imagine my surprise when I took a seat inside Fort Worth’s Sage & Silo Theatre for a revival of Bent, Martin Sherman’s pioneering if now somewhat quaint 1979 drama about the Nazi persecution of gay men, and watched as a nationally known porn star strolled on-stage. The program insert didn’t…
The last full Dallas production of a Suzan-Lori Parks play–not counting the workshop of her The America Play at Dallas Theater Center’s first Big D Festival of the Unexpected in 1993–was Undermain Theatre’s Southwest premiere of the playwright’s first big splash, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. Back in 1992,…
You have just one more weekend to catch I, Patty Diphusa, International Sex Symbol, the world premiere from Our Endeavors that has, not surprisingly, pulled in audience members beyond the typical Dallas stage crowd. The guy who cuts my hair was kicking himself last week when he had to cancel…
There is a level of technical sophistication in Theatre Three’s current production of the “lost” Stephen Sondheim period musical Saturday Night that makes it seem as though artistic director Jac Alder and his small circle of the T3 faithful have received some special injection of inspiration. The design team of…
I didn’t know much about Marian Anderson, the pioneering contralto who died just eight years ago at the age of 96, when PBS’ News Hour With Jim Lehrer did a short segment several years ago commemorating the 100th anniversary of her birth. I vaguely recall learning more in that 10…
Peruse just a handful of the estimated 190 titles from American playwright Don Nigro’s canon–Dead Men’s Fingers, Boneyard, Lucia Mad, Nightmare With Clocks–and you can’t help but think the 50-year-old writer must possess the complete collection of Goth queen Diamanda Gallas’ musical ravings, if not a few original Edward Gorey…
Speaking of writers and control, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire has stated in interviews that his huge off-Broadway hit Fuddy Meers, currently being produced at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, was one of those scripts that writes itself. He was as surprised at the desperate and disturbed high jinks as was the play’s…
In a bare, wood-floored rehearsal space in the Sammons Center for the Arts, director Mark Farr is advising two actors on the most effective way to rape Christina Vela. They are lean, muscular fellows in black leather pants and gigantic black Frankenstein platform shoes, but a tad timid about the…
Irish playwright Conor McPherson is often paired with his equally successful enfant terrible peer Martin McDonagh (The Beauty Queen of Leenane), but McPherson is slowly overtaking his more reclusive artistic brother by single-handedly reviving the idea of storytelling as theater–or at least bursting the membrane that separates the two forms…
The role of artistic associate at Dallas Theater Center is turning into a briefer and briefer stepping stone on a long career path: Preston Lane follows previous associate Jonathan Moscone’s departure a mere two and a half years after Lane came to work alongside Richard Hamburger. And just as Moscone…
Last Sunday night’s production of The Frequency of Death at Pegasus Theatre drew a healthy crowd when you consider its performance time, and as I cast my snooping journalist’s ears around the place to gather scraps of conversation, I surmised that many of these people were either first-time or very…
The centuries-old global art of shadow puppetry has been given a little light by three estimable Dallas theater talents: director Lisa Lee Schmidt, producer-puppeteer Laurel Hoitsma, and designer-performer Dalton James. Working under a loose, newly founded stage entity known as Xlthlx Productions, the trio has found a unique storybook solution…
Paul Rudnick may be the funniest American playwright who can’t really write–at least, he has major problems with balance, structure, and especially with the delicate intermingling of the serious and the silly. In his widely staged plays I Hate Hamlet, Jeffrey, and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, which receives…
