Performing Arts

For my money, Miss Great Plains was robbed. At each performance of Pageant: The Musical, on now at Uptown Players at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, the same six contestants vie to be named Miss Glamouresse. The winner is picked by a panel of judges selected from the audience. Opening night…

“Just so you know, the first act is an hour and a half long,” the attendant warned as she handed me a program for The Dallas Opera’s Sunday matinee performance of The Barber of Seville and directed me to my seat. While I’m sure her comment was meant as a…

The sound of artists at work can be heard in Trinity Groves. On Monday afternoon, at the intersection of Bataan Street and Singleton Blvd, the sound of drills, paper shuffling and loud conversation filled a bright green warehouse. Throughout the space visual artists install site-specific work; at the center, Prism…

Chances are if you haven’t heard back from Conan O’Brien’s people about tickets to one of his live tapings at The Majestic Theater next week, then you aren’t getting one. So stop crying and using an eyedropper full of food coloring to make sure you cry orange tears to fully…

Seeing a play at Theatre Three is like going to Sunday dinner at the home of an elderly relative. When the old girl feels sharp, she’ll whip up a hot homemade meal with all the trimmings. When she’s having one of her “spells,” you might sit down to a plate…

Dallas Children’s Theater has a charming, heartwarming family comedy in Mariachi Girl. A Latina fifth-grader named “Cita” (Aisha San Roman, in her 20s and a bit curvy to play a 10-year-old) idolizes her dad (David Lugo), a Mexican-born carpenter who moonlights as the leader of a mariachi band. She begs…

My first swings at arts journalism were articles about Undermain Theatre. A poetry student at Southern Methodist University, I turned my eyes up from my belly button just long enough to attend a few shows and immediately began writing about the exciting new work happening in Deep Ellum’s basement theater…

What is it like to win a Grammy? According to tenor Jay Hunter Morris, the star of The Dallas Opera’s current production of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, “It’s the most crazy, good thing ever!” “I feel like five years ago not a soul on this earth, myself included,…

Spring is here. Fittingly, the weekend’s weather forecast calls for highs of 90 degrees and lows of 45. This means that at theaters across the city, you’ll be battling strange combinations of air conditioning and heat. But that’s no excuse to miss any of the shows on this list. If…

In addition to presenting high quality renditions of old favorites like Carmen, La bohème or Don Giovanni, great opera companies also take artistic risks by presenting audiences with new or unfamiliar works. The Dallas Opera deserves props for bringing not one, but two rarely performed operas to the stage in…

Dallas Theater Center will produce nine shows next season (up from seven this season), five of them back at DTC’s original home, Kalita Humphreys Theater on Turtle Creek. That may be good news to theatergoers who prefer the free parking at Kalita and the more bottom-friendly seats at the 55-year-old…

Over her oven, Clare Floyd DeVries affixed a “Mrs. Lovett’s Pie Shop” sign. She’s a far cry from the cannibal baker in Sweeney Todd, it’s just a souvenir from one of the many sets she’s designed. “I do actually make meat pies,” she laughs. “Probably not the same kind though.”…

If you haven’t heard the news by now because you’ve been out of town, in a coma or some kind of bizarre parallel dimension that doesn’t have a good Wifi connection, Conan O’Brien is bringing his Conan show to town to tape a week’s worth of episodes at The Majestic…

The Dallas comedy scene has grown up so much so fast that among our evolving flock of chuckle monkeys, we now have “young comedians,” which in show business terms is somewhere in between the “neurula” and “tadpole” stages of comedy stardom…

All through The Fortress of Solitude, the huge new musical playing now at Dallas Theater Center (co-produced with New York’s Public Theater), we wait for that magical moment. Musicals need that moment. The good ones all have them. Eliza Doolittle’s “rain in Spain” linguistic breakthrough in My Fair Lady. The…

Late night talk show host Conan O’Brien is already in town running around and doing God-knows-what to our beloved city probably while wearing a ridiculous, oversized cowboy hat. That’s not a crack about his giant head. That’s just what we assume they hand out to out-of-towners as soon as they…

Spring has been flirting with us all winter, but it finally feels like it’s here to stay. OK, yesterday it might not have, but today it’s sunny. And let’s focus on today, shall we? Stepping outside into the sunny 75-degree weather is enough to put a spring in the step…

We’re trying not to go all TMZ here with updates about celebrities doing things that us normals do everyday like stopping for a burger, buying toilet paper in bulk and berating an intern for bringing us the wrong kind of coffee by giving them third-degree burns with it so they’ll…

Diana Sheehan is an award-winning actress and singer who relocated to Dallas five years ago and found herself following a successful New York career with a shining start in Texas, including winning “Best of the Loop” two years in a row at Watertower Theatre’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival,…

For a decade cabaret star Jim Caruso has been lighting up Mondays, traditionally Broadway’s performance-free “dark night,” with his late-night Cast Party. It’s a star-studded open mike at Manhattan’s Birdland nightclub, a time for stars to try out new material and unknowns to try to be discovered. Liza Minnelli likes…