What if you knew the truth but refused to believe it, even if denial meant certain death? Kitchen Dog Theater’s latest production, the regional premiere of Swiss playwright Max Frisch’s prescient 1958 absurdist comedy The Arsonists, sparks a low flame under that question and lets it sizzle for a couple…
For fans of the overwhelmingly funny, sometimes depressing, always deranged stick figure world of Cyanide & Happiness, this is the moment we’ve all been waiting for — the world premiere of its new show. This first season will feature 11 weekly episodes (with a depressing one mixed in — an…
Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury, the comedy music video that gave comedian and writer Rachel Bloom a career, smashed an untapped nerve with a sledgehammer. The NSFW ode used a teen pop sound to celebrate one of the greatest sci-fi writers (he always called himself a “fantasy” writer) of all time…
I never thought the DVD would fall from grace so quickly. The digital media revolution was inevitable but who knew it would happen so fast? Places like Netflix, Crackle and Hulu haven’t just eliminated the need for a DVD player to watch movies. Traditional broadcast and cable television may very…
Unfasten your seatbelts. There are no bumps on this ride. Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, that quaint morsel, is on at Dallas Theater Center. That’s because this fall Dallas Theater Center is doing big things with old shows no one has been clamoring to see again. Consider this: For its…
This past weekend, the fall season of dance in Dallas started off with two very different shows from two very different companies. In the Arts District, Dallas Black Dance Theatre opened its 2014-15 season with The Director’s Choice series; in Deep Ellum, Muscle Memory Dance Theatre opened its season with…
SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts dance program is known for putting on really good shows. The college’s dance program not only teaches its students form and choreography, it also brings in celebrated guest artists, whose work challenges both the students and any outsiders who can weave their way through…
The first time Flip Orley got on a stage and used his hypnotic powers to make people do his bidding, he himself had to be coaxed into doing it. Of course, it wasn’t with a swinging pocket watch or a spinning spiral. Sometimes, nagging someone enough is its own form…
A Hit and a Myth
for Golden AppleLyric Stage has polished up another forgotten gem of American musical theater. And what a gleaming beauty it is. The Golden Apple retells The Iliad and The Odyssey in grand comic operatic style, its characters plunked down in 1910 in a small town on Mt. Olympus in Washington. Lyric’s sparkling…
Ochre House’s latest oddity is a new light sci-fi drama written and directed by company member Kevin Grammer. Flower in the Machine takes its time — about an hour too much, frankly — to show what happens when romance withers in a world overrun by technology. Elizabeth Evans plays Girl,…
If you’re up on the local comedy scene, which seems to rotate around the nuclear hub of the Dallas Comedy House, you may have found yourself snort-laughing at jokes coming out of youngster, Saffy Herndon. The 9-year-old comedian, who tells jokes about everything from cartoons to her dad’s drinking habits…
Some comics travel for their trade because of their love of the art form or some inner need for attention or the hope of delivering to mankind a new plateau of understanding through the power of laughter. Lavell Crawford has a brutally honest reason for what keeps him going in…
Across Dallas stages, a long ignored genre of theater seems to have taken center stage. Science fiction, with all its robots, aliens, and future societies has been seen in its intellectual (Tomorrow Come Today at Undermain Theatre) and its campy (Rocky Horror Show at Dallas Theater Center). This weekend, Ochre…
When a play and the performances in it are as stirring as Jubilee Theatre’s The Brothers Size, it’s hard to find the right descriptives to do it justice. “Compelling” is too overused by critics. “Awesome,” too trite. Just know that the words of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and the work…
Hardly matters anymore if a musical is a hit or a flop on Broadway. Big regional companies like Addison’s WaterTower Theatre are so starved for new shows they’ll grab rights to anything that played a week or two in New York, as long as there are roles for hot young…
Theater companies and arts critics around Dallas have declared recent SMU drama grad Jeffrey Colangelo a budding genius as a playwright, director and fight choreographer. He’s certainly a genius at one thing: convincing people he’s brilliant with shows that are both boring and baffling in their lack of originality. His…
In the center of an abandoned warehouse, carpenters put the final screws into a sandbox big enough for a giant. Near the front of the box, a woman buries a man in the sand. She’s wearing a black leotard and a mask reminiscent of the reptilian birds from Labyrinth, he’s…
“Criminals have more fun” could’ve been the subtitle of the musical, Bonnie & Clyde, currently on stage at WaterTower Theatre. History’s law-breaking power couple certainly have a better time than the rest of their family in the Depression-era story. And it seems the actors playing them are having a damn…
The great comedians know that they don’t have to create fiction, they simply have to pluck out the insane bits of a world trying to wrestle with its sanity and present it in the way a carnival barker would just before he pulls back the curtain to reveal some horrid…
Three years ago, Shakespeare Dallas launched a project called, “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.” The gist was simple: Over five years, the company’s actors would recite every single word Shakespeare ever wrote in a monthly series of staged readings. This includes plays and poetry. According to the Folger Shakespeare…
Tennessee Williams described The Two-Character Play as his “most beautiful” drama after A Streetcar Named Desire. He may have been a bit too in love with his own words. It’s a haunting piece laced with poetry, madness and tragedy, but it’s no Streetcar. The current production of The Two-Character Play…
Director Michael Serrecchia has gathered some mighty big voices to play Little Women in the musical version of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas ends its season with this show. On a multi-level set by Rodney Dobbs that has the cast navigating steps made of giant stacks of…
