There may not be another 3-1/2-hour play that says as much about contemporary family life, and says it with such gritty realism, as Tracy Letts’ explosive, hilarious August: Osage County. Director René Moreno’s fine production up at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre winds up its three-week run April 22. It’s a chance…
The wild and wonderful Westons of Oklahoma are back. Think your family’s crazy? This bunch thrives on hard liquor and invective. As the subjects of Tracy Letts’ much-honored play August: Osage County, the Westons are the most pill-addled, booze-soaked, internecine American family to tear up a stage since the Tyrones…
Actors Jenny Ledel and Cameron Cobb have experience with ghosts. In last summer’s Hamlet at Shakespeare Dallas, they played Ophelia and the moody Dane in an especially dark take on the Bard’s dance with death. Now in Kitchen Dog Theater’s production of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, they…
Nouveau 47 Theatre at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park is building a reputation as a developer of interesting new plays. Their new works festival is coming up soon and they like to foster relationships with young writers and performers pouring heart, soul and fresh ideas onto the stage. Their…
A creepy mansion crawling with unhappy ghosts is the setting of Henry James’ spooky 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, now playing at Kitchen Dog Theater in a spiffy, stripped-down stage adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher. Jenny Ledel lets hysteria build slowly in her portrayal of a newly hired governess…
On Monday night, April 2, WaterTower Theatre opens the first local production of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer- and Tony-winning masterpiece, August: Osage County. The sprawling drama has been compared with O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Imagine O’Neill’s troubled Tyrone family turned into the wacked-out Westons of Oklahoma. The WaterTower show,…
They’ll make you wear a nametag at Bryant Hall, set up like a hotel conference room for Second Thought Theatre’s mixed-media production of Dallas playwright Eric Steele’s The Midwest Trilogy. There’s free coffee in Styrofoam cups and cheap cookies, fuel for an 80-minute production that includes two short films and…
All rise for Superior Donuts. Tracy Letts’ funny little play about lonely people has brought light and laughter (and the scent of coffee and tasty pastries) to Theatre Too, the 80-seat space below Theatre Three. They’ve created a fully functioning South Side Chicago doughnut shop down there, run by a…
Uptown Players, take a bow. Ten years ago this gay-focused theater company, started by executive producers Craig Lynch and Jeff Rane, put on little shows with little money in a tiny hole of a space off Stemmons Freeway. Now they occupy the 400-seat, city-owned, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Kalita Humphreys Theater…
Those who were in the audience that night in October 2005 remember it well. The national tour of Wicked had hit the Music Hall at Fair Park for the first time and it was a sold-out opening. A huge Broadway smash (it’s still playing to capacity crowds in New York),…
Eric Steele is a busy young Dallas playwright and screenwriter who thinks theater and film aren’t mutually exclusive art forms. With his show The Midwest Trilogy, now playing through April 7 at Second Thought Theatre, he’s combined two films and one live actor into a single 90-minute production. Just off…
Dallas Comedy House took a bath in funny pheromones then baited in talent from across the country for this year’s Dallas Comedy Festival, which runs from March 27 through April 1. The lineup looks slammin,’ and we’ll have interviews with the comedians up until the fest kicks off, so that…
“That awkward moment when …” is a running theme in some of the best shows in this year’s busy Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Going on one more weekend, the festival crams more than 60 performances of 22 different productions into its 11-day schedule. Shows…
Somewhere in Fitness Heaven, Jack LaLanne’s biceps are smiling down, preparing their spiritual descent upon Dallas tomorrow night in a Pentecost of absurd artistic revelry. You see, just like the late-great LaLanne’s epic stature, from his Kilimanjaro pectorals to his Stonehenge quadriceps, monumental strength is often best realized in concert,…
Everyone watches television, but hardly anyone can tell you who invented it. Lightbulb? Edison. Telephone? Bell. TV? Huh? You’ll know a lot more after you see The Farnsworth Invention, a play by Aaron Sorkin getting its Dallas debut at Theatre Three. Sorkin, who won an Oscar for The Social Network,…
What writer Aaron Sorkin did with the founding of Facebook for his Oscar-winning screenplay The Social Network, he does with similar flourishes in his play about the fathers of television, The Farnsworth Invention. Getting its Dallas debut in an exceptionally zippy production at Theatre Three, the play is an explosive…
Congratulations Michael Martinez! You get to see One Man Lord of the Rings on Sunday, compliments of WaterTower Theatre’s Loop Festival. The festival kicks off tomorrow and tickets are still available for some of Mr. Ross’ performances; get them here. For a breakdown of other cool Loop plays, check this…
I was starting to feel like Out of the Loop Fringe Festival would never arrive. The ten day, highly experimental outsider theater festival has been sitting on the timeline’s horizon; I nearly constructed an advent calendar to make the waiting more bearable. Starting tomorrow, theater-goers will pour into WaterTower’s multiple…
Here’s how small the Ochre House theater is: When the actors in Mean, Matthew Posey’s new musical about Charlie Manson, enter and exit, they use the front door of the place. A whoosh of wind comes in off the sidewalk on Exposition Avenue as actors two-step through the audience in…
Casting news for local plays isn’t usually headline-worthy. Unless, that is, the artistic director from one major theater is cast as an actor in a much-anticipated production at another major theater. That’s the inside-baseball scoop about WaterTower Theatre honcho Terry Martin showing up as the lead in Dallas Theater Center’s…
The kids in the sweet, funny new play The Chicken Who Wasn’t Chicken, running in Plano through Sunday, February 26, don’t know how lucky they are. The script is a new one from Matt Lyle, a former Dallas writer and actor who went on to Second City’s writing program in…
The guys hanging out together in Steven Walters’ get-down funny play Pluck the Day are old high school buds, now in their 30s and starting to go to seed. Duck, the former gridiron star (played with lovable stupidity by Clay Yocum), and brainy Bill (Chris LaBove) are worried about their…
