Opening night of any show is nerve-wracking. What if someone forgets their lines? Or walks onstage at the wrong cue? What if the lights don’t work or the music won’t play? It can make even the most polished professional feel the urge to nervous puke all over their shoes. Now…
Talking to comedian Doug Stanhope for the first time can be an intimidating experience. It’s not that he’s an angry comic or even an angry person. He’s probably one of the most pleasant, affable comics you’ll ever meet, but he also has a legendary streak of self-loathing that sets the…
The 2014 Fort Worth Opera Festival starts this weekend and you know what that means: time to head to Cowtown and binge-watch opera. Instead of spreading productions out across several months, the Fort Worth Opera presents their entire season in just three, short, drama-packed weeks (April 19 through May 11)…
Hipster, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies, it’s time to slip your orbs toward one Lord Buckley. He was a regal cat-daddy, an original, a performer of jazz-infused stand-up drawn from the scribblings of master scribes. Ochre House theater’s own in-house hipster Matthew Posey has penned a new play, and directed it,…
It was a mistake to put a clock on the wall of the set for Gidion’s Knot, the two-character Johnna Adams one-act now running at Kitchen Dog Theater. Set in a schoolroom, the play unfolds in real time, though you’d swear it warps and slows down somewhere in the middle…
A Saturday Night Live cast member who Rolling Stone called the show’s “secret weapon” is on the docket to do a one-night only show at the Addison Improv…
Comedian and actor Todd Barry will be in Dallas April 25 at the Sons of Hermann Hall to promote his Louis C.K.-produced “Todd Barry: The Crowd Work Tour.” It won’t be the typical guy-stands-before-crowd-and-tells-jokes show. Instead, it’s complete improv and his main source of material is you, the audience…
Nocturne begins and ends with death and speaks of little else in between. Don’t let that put you off. The play by Adam Rapp, now running at Second Thought Theatre, announces its mordant theme in the first line uttered by the only character who speaks for nearly two hours. He…
A small show that deserves a bigger audience than it’s getting is Soul of Sam: The Sam Cooke Story, now on at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. Written and directed by Sheran Keyton for her Fort Worth-based DVA Productions, it tells the life story of the 1950s-’60s singer/songwriter known…
A transvestite, an Oscar nominee, a football team, a mother who kills her kids and some Jane Austen. Dallas Theater Center’s 2014-’15 season has all of those, plus Scrooge and a play about a book club called, what else, The Book Club Play. No big family-oriented show, however, unless that’s…
Dallas Theater Center is just hours away from releasing its official announcement of its 2014-’15 season, but we already know this: No Dracula, no Shakespeare…
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…
