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…
Sitting on the stage of the McKinney Avenue Contemporary recently, playwright Erik Ehn evoked the presence of a visiting spiritual dignitary–calm, understated, full of humility. “I’m as perplexed by the script as you are–so there,” he said during the recent question-and-answer session for the MAC’s Playwrights Project. “If my plays…
I guess it should come as no surprise that Pump Boys and Dinettes, the current feel-good musical offering at Theatre Three, was a box-office hit in New York. But I’m perplexed about why it’s gotten the critical attention it has. I am not an elitist. I like to be entertained,…
Russian writers get a bad rap. Far from being suicide and samovar-obsessed weird-beards, they are actually rather jolly fellows. Examples? you ask. Well, take Dostoevsky and that funny scene in Crime and Punishment where Razumikhin cracks the old lady’s skull open with an axe and “the blood gushed as from…
Theatre Three producer and director Jac Alder owes Jason Drummond a favor. It seems the young SMU student told Alder to check out the musical release of an unknown comedy, Lucky Stiff. Alder not only bought the music, he staged the play. And it will probably turn out to be…
You must picture it first: five Irish sisters, single women in their 30s and 40s, tending assiduously to home and hearth in the small town of Ballybeg. Their only vice–and only an Irish Catholic could consider it such–is a wireless (a.k.a. radio) that plays “Irish dance music all the way…
There is perhaps no better place to film a Chekhov play, especially a postmodern adaptation of Uncle Vanya, than in an extravagantly distressed Broadway theater. The New Amsterdam theater on 42nd Street, home of the Ziegfeld Follies and an erstwhile porn house, is perfect for the part: dangerous and abandoned,…
Anyone with even a passing interest in the culture of corporate America will enjoy Undermain Theatre’s ongoing production of Tiny Dimes. Playwright Peter Mattei, a founding member of Cucaracha Theatre in New York, has created an absurdist comedy that makes complete sense and none at all, a nonnarrative piece that…
When I first noted that Kitchen Dog Theater’s current production, composed of two one-acts and called Women’s Voices, included the work of a man, I was a little baffled. I mean, if Kitchen Dog wanted to give the evening that kind of feminist–or at least feminine–weight, couldn’t it have found…
It is true that those who despise Mark Morris’ dancemaking do so for the same reasons many of us find him the most innovative choreographer of his generation. In some eyes, Morris has brought a fine-tuned and sensitive musicality formerly missing from postmodern dance, while his gender-bending style helped liberate…
When the curtain first lifted on the antimusical Avenue X, my first thought was, this is just another musical. That’s not a bad thing normally, but I expected a different, scrappy kind of beginning rather than the entire ensemble gently singing a lovely opening number amidst a muted set. The…
John Jiler seems the least likely candidate to write a musical. A 48-year-old free spirit who doesn’t remember the ’60s–and therefore must have been there–Jiler says his only ambition through much of adulthood “was to have as many strange experiences as possible.” The playwright, who is half Irish-American and half…
Coming in at 10,000-plus performances, The Fantasticks is the Cats of off-Broadway–and the longest-running musical in the world, according to press materials. Much of its legendary charm is due to its lyrical, sometimes melancholy music, from the legendary “Try to Remember” to “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.” The work, written by…
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol because he needed money, and it’s been produced for that same sound reason for more than a century. It might have proved more interesting, however, if the Dallas Theater Center had staged a modern adaptation of Dickens’ Oliver Twist this year rather than the…
“What is a battery?” Rip asks his apprentice, Stan. “Two cells placed in a container, one dominant and one recessive,” Stan answers in a flat and dutiful tone, as if he were studying to appear on the TV quiz show Jeopardy. This is the definition that Rip, the repair man…
It was a place of force– The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, Tearing off my voice, and the sea Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead Unreeling in it, spreading like oil. –from “The Rabbit Catcher” by Sylvia Plath. Uttering nothing but blood–…
The road has risen up to meet Dallas’ Kitchen Dog Theater, proving that hard work and artistic talent, even of an alternative and sometimes enigmatic nature, can still be rewarded. The company’s good fortune this season began with a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. (If that…
“His Majesty,” Oscar Wilde purrs to an expectant King Edward VII, “is like a warm stream of bat’s piss. So strong in his sentiments and flowing in his expression.” Monty Python fans will no doubt remember this (paraphrased) line from the classic sketch in which Wilde, Shaw, and other celebrated…
There are, of course, two Dallases. There’s slick, soulless, sprawling, sterile Dallas, the one that all right-thinking boulevardiers disdain. And then there’s quirky, progressive, funky, interesting, artistic Dallas, its wee heart beating like a field mouse in its hole, which is all the more cherished by the cognoscenti (you and…
Editor’s note: Nora FitzGerald, Dallas Observer’s stage columnist, is on maternity leave. Longtime Observer contributor P.B. Miller is filling in during her absence. Theatrical comedy is a tough sell these days–not that it was ever easy. Finding an audience for comedic theater is even harder now, though, because there’s a…
