Kathy Griffin will be performing in Dallas at The Majestic June 25th, so we caught up with her to ask her a few questions about her new tour, “Like A Boss.” Griffin says her act is ever-changing, “I still make fun of the celebrities that I’m friends with, and I…
William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays without any character ever turning to another to say “Are you OK?” The two main characters in Amy Herzog’s 90-minute, four-person drama Belleville say it a lot. The lazy little linguistic glitch is the mark of a playwright less concerned about the literary merits of…
Even if you’re really, really interested in the theater, purchasing tickets to see a few shows a month can knock a huge hole in your entertainment budget, which should generally otherwise be reserved for purchasing copious amounts of alcohol. Still, you should make it a priority to see at least…
The minutes before a play begins are usually spent flipping through the program, examining coupons for restaurants you’ll never visit and marveling that one of the evening’s performers was on Law and Order: SVU. Not so at the opening performance of Stop Hitting Yourself at the Wyly Theatre. One of…
Kitchen Dog Theater’s final play in its longtime home at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary is The Firestorm. What a title for a damp squib of drama by Meridith Friedman, getting an undeserved “rolling premiere” starting at KDT and moving on to other theaters elsewhere. Directed by Tina Parker, The Firestorm…
The smartest man in Radio Golf isn’t the man with money. That’s just one of the home truths in August Wilson’s final play in his epic 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle. African American Repertory Theatre’s strong production of Radio Golf benefits from sharp, well-directed performances by five hometown actors who click with…
This Is the First Time the Rude Mechs Have Been to Dallas Just a quick hop down 35, the state’s most interesting theater troupe call Austin home. There, for the past two decades, they’ve been devising new work that has earned raves from critics for its inventive staging, satirical wit,…
As soon as word got around over the weekend that Theatre Three founder and producing director Jac Alder had died, local actors and others started swapping stories. Alder, 80, had been hospitalized last month with pneumonia and was in ICU for several weeks, but had rallied and returned home to…
Believe the man in the purple pants when he says he cannot tell the truth. He is the title character in The Liar, a 400-year-old comedy by Pierre Corneille remade in 2012 into a rip-snortin’ rhyming farce by Venus in Fur playwright David Ives, working on a commission from the…
A comedian without a dark side is a rare thing. “There’s not one that comes to mind,” Clint Werth admits. A local standup comic who skipped comedy classes and jumped right into open mics, he pauses and gives the topic further consideration. “Some are not necessarily dark, but still troubled.”…
Do you remember when Michelle Obama cut her bangs? Of course you do. This inane conversation topic was part of our national dialogue for weeks. Did she look better with or without? What did it say about her femininity? And more important, her blackness? Playwright Meridith Friedman finds this microscopic…
The last day at the Dallas Comedy House’s old Commerce Street location in March was also the final day of the 6th Annual Dallas Comedy Festival, a five-day showcase of local and national stand-up, sketch and improvisational talent. The gathering didn’t end when the festival’s headliners TJ & Dave took…
A sweeping novel like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility isn’t one that travels easily to the stage. Too many picnics, rainstorms, carriage rides and strolls down country lanes in the 19th-century classic. The 1995 film did it right. Director Ang Lee had an all-star British cast led by actress Emma…
One of the country’s most interesting theater troupes resides in Austin. Just a quick ride down 35 will guide you to the backyard of the Rude Mechanicals, a group that creates off-the-wall, intellectually challengingly and wildly fun theater. It’s worth the drive every time, whether they’re workshopping a piece, or…
Watching Danny O’Connor’s new dark comedy one-act The Down Low, set in a 956-square-foot house on East Mockingbird Lane, is like living inside a Tarantino film for 75 minutes. Bad things happen to people just inches away from where you’re sitting. Hilarious things, too. Every time there’s a knock on…
Perhaps one of the most beautiful sights in the world is a ballet dancer pirouetting on water. It doesn’t happen everyday. But in honor of the Soluna festival sashaying into our lives this week, we present the graceful ladies of Avant Chamber Ballet, along with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s cellist,…
When Matthew Posey, the creative genius at the tiny Ochre House theater, decides to get silly with a new play, he gets crazy-silly. That’s a good thing right now. We need some lighthearted whimsy to ward off the heavy bad-news blues, and The Egg Salesman, Posey’s ova-easy new comedy, is…
Newsies is Annie with boys. And not young boys either, at least not the cast of the touring production currently tapping, back-flipping and flexed-foot kicking across the stage at the Winspear Opera House. These aren’t moppets or teenagers. This is a bunch of cute but short-statured young men pretending to…
Dance nerds, classical music fans, and even lovers of the fairy tale should have their tickets in hand already for this weekend’s productions of Cinderella by French company Malandain Ballet Biarritz. For a night of stunning entertainment, it falls in the 10-zone. But…on a scale of one to 10, just…
There are just a few truly classic works of theater. Plays or musicals that don’t just remain relevant, but the characters continue to introduce new worlds to an audience, the language continues to dance, and the ideas continue to ignite discussions. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is one such play…
You don’t have to be in love with the old play-with-music Lady in the Dark to appreciate its artful sophistication. It’s an odd one, more psychodrama than full-out musical; there are only 65 minutes of singing spread out over two and a half hours. But because it’s almost never produced…
By Jeremy Hallock After struggling as a comedian for over 20 years, Marc Maron finally started hitting his stride in 2009 with his enormously popular “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast and then the IFC TV series, Maron, which debuted in 2013. He easily commanded the large crowd from the huge…
