I recently spoke before about 30 members of the local volunteer arts fundraising group 500 Inc.–with more than a little trepidation. I was the guest of the Undermain Theatre, which, like all major recipients of grants from this group, must provide free “Sample The Arts” events for the organization. My…
Can I compose a critical mash note to Dallas actor Terry Martin, star of the Texas premiere of Dan Butler’s The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me, that doesn’t sound foolish? Probably not, but any such effort would contain some sentiment like: It’s hard as hell to make…
In print advertisements for its current production, Dallas Theater Center declares Eugene O’Neill’s 1940 Long Day’s Journey Into Night to be America’s greatest play. Leaving aside the strained hyperbole of calling any piece of art the greatest in its field, there are certainly other contenders for this specious honor, from…
We’re living in a world where Dilbert creator Scott Adams, supposed hero of the corporate grunt and Office Depot shill, has gone on the record with a major national newsmagazine with the comment that, ya know, downsizing may not be such a bad thing after all. Actually, you could argue…
If you’re Anglo, you might approach a night of theater titled Latin American Evening with the smug assumption of someone who knows what’s inside the tamale before you even unroll the corn husk. It’s a mindset whites would never have when confronting a show called “Anglo-Saxon Evening,” but then again,…
In taking five of author Willa Cather’s early short stories and distilling them into a brand-new musical he calls Cather County, composer-librettist Ed Dixon would seem to have located one of the great themes of a great American writer: how the land transforms us even as we transform the land…
If you’re looking for a tax write-off that also fortifies the First Amendment, not to mention the cause of artistic richness and innovation in our city, a wealthy Dallas businessperson could do worse than to drop a big wad of money into the lap of the Undermain Theatre. It prides…
How, you may ask, did 17th-century master satirist Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was the handle on his birth certificate) write with such incendiary insight on the vanity and frailty of human beings? You don’t have to read too far in his bio to figure it out: The guy was trained as…
Tempting though it is, the stage critic will not leap into the fray of current presidential scandal to declare that Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, now being staged by Dallas Theater Center, is prophetic because it concerns a politician haunted by a misdeed he believed was long buried. The genius…
A critic is always put in an awkward position when expressing dislike of any show playing at Kurt Kleinmann’s Pegasus Theatre, because the kind of broad comedy they specialize in succeeds or fails almost exclusively on the personal tastes of each audience member, not any objective appraisal of the material…
When you hear theater snobs hold forth on the civilized, specialized virtues of live performance, they often invoke that art form’s timelessness. Live performance, or at least some form of oratory before an attentive crowd, probably predates the advent of recorded history. Some form of it has appeared in virtually…
According to playwright Lee Marans, Old Wicked Songs, his searingly funny Pulitzer Prize nominee from 1996, will be the second most produced play in regional American theater this season. Theatre Three snagged the script for its Southwestern premiere and has blessed us all with a magnificently paced, poetically performed production–and…
It’s a tad early, not to mention uncouth, to name a Dallas stage award after myself. But since I procrastinate in all other areas of my life, I might as well be early naming, in my honor, a citation for excellence. Flouting Mark Twain’s aphorism that good breeding is merely…
Sitting in the cavernous, “temporary” Arts District Theater to watch Dallas Theater Center’s energetic but passionless A Christmas Carol, I couldn’t help looking around and noticing how much better dressed everyone else was than me. Of course, my friends would be quick to point out that even if I could…
Regular readers can now tell this whiny Scrooge of a stage critic that he finally got what he’s been bitching about for weeks–a new and decidedly nontraditional holiday play titled Greetings!. I must say that, as much as I enjoyed looking at it, I’m not sure what the hell to…
I hope that Quincy Long’s bracing, cheeky “children’s play” A Por Quinley Christmas is revived often over the next few generations, the way Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been for us. That will allow future, cyberspace theater critics to one day rail against it as toothless and overfamiliar the…
Legendary American standup Lenny Bruce became a legend not because he was flat-out funny. Listening to his recorded material today–from his famous “Lone Ranger” routine to his various tours through the ethnic hothouses of the urban landscape–reveals a rather glaring lack of imagination, especially when you compare what has survived…
When people refer to playwright Alan Ayckbourn as “the British Neil Simon,” the comparison is usually intended to be a compliment. Both men are god-awful rich (with Simon probably in the lead, but only because of the countless American movie versions of his plays); both, at their best, have stitched…
There are two plays that alternate in New Theatre Company’s crisp, occasionally volatile production of Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen. One is the portrait of an aborted relationship, the other a savage, expressionistic landscape of the terrain between art and identity, commercial success and exploitation. You have to wonder if Margulies…
“How they gonna keep him down on the farm once he’s seen Paree?” was roughly the question in some friend’s minds when I told them I was going to cram as much theatergoing as I could afford into my eight-day Manhattan vacation. After I arrived–during various conversations in which I…
Watching Dallas Theater Center’s gutsy (and I mean that literally, but more later) production of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I couldn’t help but wonder why American playwrights haven’t plundered the 19th-century American frontier for the kind of blood-red gems Ondaatje has uncovered. As directed with…
If, while in the grocery checkout or ATM line, you find yourself standing next to a young man or woman with a shockingly inappropriate platinum dye job, there are two possible explanations–either the person shares Dennis Rodman’s hairdresser, or he or she is a cast member of Kitchen Dog Theater’s…
