What, the cynical historian might ask, can a play written in 413 B.C. say about the 1997 us? Whatever it tells us–and if you pay close attention to the text, placarded with disciplined but unaffected readings in the Gryphon Players’ new mounting of Euripides’ Electra, you’ll find much that’s familiar–you…
If there’s one rule to staging Sam Shepard’s wildly eccentric plays, it’s that the cast must have a sense of humor. The poetry in Shepard’s enormous canon (45 plays, among which are 11 Obie winners) has hoodwinked more than a few actors and directors into taking Shepard, as crazy as…
Scarcely have I felt two conflicting emotions so intensely as during All’s Well That Ends Well, the finale of Dallas Theater Center’s 1996-’97 season. I was soothed and startled, delighted and disturbed by the tension between this crisp, stately staging by Richard Hamburger and the acidic sentiments of Shakespeare’s 1602…
Only recently have I been able to articulate why the stage musical so often encounters a “Keep Out” sign on the door of my heart. I’m an essentially sentimental person who can coo over empty packages when they’re wrapped in original style, which is precisely what Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner…
When my eyes landed on the definition of “arabesque” in Webster’s Dictionary, a thought hit me with the force of a quick, hard wedgie: I’m a fraud. I was researching to write this review of one program in Deep Ellum Opera Theatre’s March series, A Month of Dance. Webster’s was…
God bless the children who attended the same Saturday matinee performance of The Yellow Boat that I did. During a question-and-answer session after the show, they demonstrated that you don’t just lose your innocence when you become an adult–if you’re not careful, you can also shed a certain clear, tough…
I must say that A Rose By Any Other Name, the 1997 season opener for Teatro Dallas, surprised me at regular intervals throughout its 90 minutes without intermission. There were enough changes in tone and texture–not to mention a rich performance by one of its stars that didn’t begin to…
Since the blues is probably America’s greatest musical contribution to world culture, it’s not surprising that both African-American and Anglo-American artists have attempted to translate the genre’s quixotic vibe to arts both performing and static. We shouldn’t be surprised that so many such experiments have failed (including Toni Morrison’s weakest…
It’s refreshing to be reminded by the Undermain Theatre that Shakespeare wrote comedies, too. And that, slain in the right lunatic spirit, they’re damned funny in the least complicated way possible. Shakespeare’s plays continue to bear nutritious fruit, surprising when you consider that they are raided in and out of…
In many ways, Sam Shepard’s rigorously honed dramedy True West is more evocative of the funhouse floor on which the author stands than any of his other plays. Perhaps the most purely comic of Shepard’s quartet of family safaris (Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child came first, A…
Artistic director Bruce Coleman and his versatile New Theatre Company have just abandoned a semi-permanent home for a permanent one, alternating shows with Deep Ellum Opera Theatre at TOES (Theatre on Elm Street). Interest is burgeoning from corporate backers, and the company has added an extra performance to their weekly…
If Theatre Three’s comedies sometimes creak and lurch like a ship of fools set adrift, Norma Young and Jac Alder’s venerable Dallas theater-in-the-round has consistently demonstrated its wit and energy with musicals. You might’ve expected this standard to be compromised with 1995’s Lucky Stiff, a musical farce by Stephen Flaherty…
With the release of Jane Campion’s confused Portrait of a Lady, all eyes are on the gay American novelist Henry James. In the world of popular cinema, which pits great literary artists against one another as if they were Hollywood players, James is called the next Jane Austen. Like Britain’s…
Jean Cocteau, who died in 1963 at the age of 74, was the kind of artist almost nobody takes seriously anymore. Which is to say he was a man driven by the pure urge to create, rather than possessing a command of one particular medium. He wrote poetry, novels, and…
On one of the coldest nights this winter, I am led up a curving staircase that begins in the lobby of the Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys space. Near the top of the steps is the open door to Frank’s Place, a rehearsal space cum mini-theater named after the designer…
I must admit that I wasn’t anticipating with delight Theatre Three’s perennial holiday production of The Fantasticks. Nothing against the nice folks at T3, but I’m the kind of fellow who considers seasonal sentiment a prison sentence. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker when she was a New York stage critic for…
There were two different performances happening the Saturday night I saw Deep Ellum Opera Theatre’s production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s holiday classic Amahl and the Night Visitors. One occurred when I closed my eyes, and it was easily the most charming of the twins–the voices of the performers were alternately…
If some doubted that the 20th-century black Sunday sermon doubled as spectacular theater, a story distributed last month on the Associated Press wire should convince otherwise. Apparently, African-American evangelical Christian churches in upstate New York have become hot tourist stops for Europeans vacationing in America. Tourist buses have made Sunday…
Dallas-based performance artist Dalton James fills his newest one-man show at the Swiss Avenue Theater, Wet Willie Loves Pyro, with all kinds of personal details–failed romance, family deaths and conflicts, childhood dreams, a leaky air conditioner that nearly drives him mad. At least, we assume that these are personal issues,…
They just don’t make purely theatrical animals like Noel Coward anymore, eccentric creatures with greasepaint for blood and a gloriously pathological need to project their own cultivated persona onto every character they write and perform. Like many of the playwrights-actors-composers of his generation, Coward erased the line in his own…
There are many reasons why Jonathan Tolins’ The Twilight of the Golds should become obsolete in just a few short years–or so you think as the Dallas premiere by Littlefinger Productions unfurls in front of you. Unfortunately, this problem plagues many scripts concerning contemporary gay themes, because as the gay…
Countless playwrights have this century tackled the Spanish legend of Don Juan, the man whose insatiable appetite for women represented what could be considered the first feminist cautionary fable. Even those writers who have explored the comic possibilities in Juan’s winding trail of broken hearts have rarely ignored the serial…
