“All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s famous opening lines to Anna Karenina lifted the lid on the pot of stewing emotions that exist in almost every familial setting. A lot of writers have poked around in that pot since, Arthur Miller…
You never know what you’re going to get when you go on an anti-communist tirade. Take The Invisible Circus. It never would have come into being if Joe McCarthy hadn’t made things too hot in America for artists like Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin emigrated to Switzerland to escape the ill wind…
Where would children’s literature be without the Brits? Fairy tales and other traditional stories aside, it’s British writers, most of them active from the late 1800s to about 1950, who created the canon of works for children that most of us grew up with. Take away Lewis Carroll, George McDonald,…
This production poses for the umpteenth time the hoary philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” It’s not the play itself that’s directly concerned with this conundrum, however. Rather, it’s the fact that the play is being performed…
Rosanne Rosanna Danna was right. It’s always something. Take paranoia. Just when we’ve learned to stop worrying about the Bomb, the Bug crops up to give us the collective willies. Mushroom clouds have been supplanted by super viruses as the peril du jour–a peril that threatens to spread across the…
If there’s one thing audiences won’t put up with these days, it’s exposition. Like a horny teenager, they want to cut right to the chase. The current obsession with getting to the bottom line makes Murder on the Nile a tough play to stage. Agatha Christie, the old sot, likes…
There are soreheads among us who claim to dislike musicals as a dramatic form because they lack verisimilitude. Orchestral music doesn’t well up and people don’t break into song at the drop of a hat in real life the way they do in musicals, these dry, mostly Norwegian nitpickers complain…
Right-thinking people–and Woody Allen agrees with me on this–would much rather live in the 1930s than endure our current decade, if somehow they had a choice. No, not the real Thirties, with its bread lines, fascist pogroms, lynchings, and all of that. I mean the champagne-laced Fred and Ginger Thirties,…
David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley belong to a select group–playwrights who have had their work interpreted by chick singers with only one name (Madonna in Mamet’s case, Cher in Shanley’s). This highly significant factoid has not been lost on the 11th Street Theatre Project, which has cannily combined a…
What happened to Stephen Wade should happen to everyone. The young Chicagoan was having a perfectly average early ’60s American childhood until the night he saw the Beatles on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” From that point forward, the Creepy Crawlers set began to gather loam in the closet as Wade…
Imagine for a moment that the good citizens of Austin have Dallas surrounded and are lobbing mortar shells into the streets, gang-raping women, and “cleansing” the Metroplex of its men. Now imagine that you are a playwright who wishes to comment on these events, but in order to reach the…
Editor’s note: Beginning this week, P.B. Miller, a longtime Dallas Observer contributor, takes over our regular Stage column. Nora FitzGerald, our previous columnist, has relocated to the Washington, D.C. area. Before she passed, Eurydice-like, from these pages, Nora FitzGerald asked me to visit several area theaters she had been unable…
I write this, my final column for the Dallas Observer, from an otherwise empty townhouse I have just moved into, somewhere between the Beltway and Virginia’s Bible belt. It is the transitory nature of this business that just when you feel confident in your writing gig and your babysitter and…
At the recent yearly summit of Dallas’ theater critics, a ritual gathering designed to hash out the annual Dallas Theater Critics Forum Awards, the group discussed that there were perhaps 40 to 50 fewer productions this past season than in previous years. No one had an answer for the sad…
In a few weeks, Undermain Theatre will fly to Macedonia to perform Sarajevo, a play written by Macedonian native Goran Stefanovsky, at the three-week summer festival there. Ten theaters will perform at the festival, and all of them except the Undermain are Eastern European troupes. The Undermain members have taken…
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde created a wry, entertaining novel that has also become a modern myth: the protagonist Dorian–based on the youthful-looking John Gray, whom Wilde was quietly courting at the time–remained young, seductive, and beautiful as his hidden portrait was transformed into an ugly, wretched,…
Picture it: trendy Manhattan folks sipping cafe latte at the terminally hip Cornelia Street Cafe, while in a corner, Melissa Cooper entertains them with her talents as a ventriloquist. Using a dummy named Jack Wood, Cooper explores the silly and the satirical, from channeling with the dummy to creating little…
Though Anthony Burgess deplored what he saw as modern society’s mechanization of men’s souls, he was a bit of a machine himself. During his allotted three score and 10, Burgess manufactured more than 30 novels, multiple volumes of literary criticism, and hundreds of essays, yet still found time to play…
Not surprisingly, Beginner, the new Erik Ehn work commissioned by the Undermain Theatre, is akin to a religious or spiritual experience. Ehn, a playwright fascinated with the iconography of religion, asks you to travel with him to parts unknown. To get something out of it, you have to give up…
Octavio Solis was Dallas’ homecoming king last week. Most of the people in the packed house at the Arts District Theater for his play Santos & Santos knew him when he lived here, pretended to know him, or were friends with someone who knew him. Teachers from the Arts Magnet…
You have to give Gaitley Mathews credit. The indefatigable artistic director of Deep Ellum Opera Theatre nurtures ambitious new operas in his hole-in-the-wall, neo-warehouse setting. And Mathews’ current offering, Mata Hari, is his third world premiere. It is based on a true tale that has all the elements of an…
In the long run, Richard Hamburger’s success with the Dallas Theater Center will be measured by plays such as Santos & Santos. Written by Texas-born playwright Octavio Solis, Santos is a dark work that explores the underbelly of the American dream through an immigrant crime family. Hamburger has described the…
