Five years ago, actress Diana Sheehan had what she describes as “the most euphoric day of my life.” Both of her young children were in school all day at last and, for the first time in years, Sheehan found she was free to do whatever she wanted. “I danced for…
As small, intense, pull-your-hair-out comedies, the new plays Coyote and Collapse have a lot in common. Coyote, playing a few more performances at Nouveau 47’s tiny theater at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park, puts us out in the Arizona desert with a couple of those trigger-happy “Minutemen” militia guys…
This is the final weekend of performances of Coyote, a seat-gripper of a play at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park. Nouveau 47, the little troupe modeling itself on the Margo Jones theater company of 60 years ago, premieres Kevin Kautzman’s excellent script, which had its first reading here last…
Bick and Leslie’s Big Song in Giant There are many things amiss in the musical Giant, the Dallas Theater Center/Public Theater co-production playing a couple more weekends at the Wyly Theatre. But let’s just look at the top dozen. 1. These Yankees make rotten Texans. The whole cast of Giant…
Among the promising slate of new works by local playwrights debuting at this year’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, March 1-10 at WaterTower Theatre in Addison, is the dark comedy International Falls by Waco writer, actor and former stand-up comic Thomas Ward. It’s a 90-minute one-act, premiering on WaterTower’s…
A giant of a musical opened here the other night, but it wasn’t Giant, the horseless cowpoke operetta now plodding along at the Wyly Theatre, a co-production between Dallas Theater Center and New York’s Public Theater. It was Kismet at Irving’s Lyric Stage, a four-performance concert that ticked all the…
Former American Idol finalist Constantine Maroulis has turned into one of Broadway’s favorite leading men. It was announced in January that he’ll star as both title roles in the New York revival of Frank Wildhorn’s musical Jekyll & Hyde in 2013. Maroulis was a Tony nominee a few years ago…
Not to get all Alex P. Keaton on you, but there’s something intensely gratifying when an investment pays off. Last December, the Observer put down some seed money for two artists and a non-profit, with an aim to reward the already-incalculable contribution that they had made to our community and…
You need two things when you do the musical Hairspray: a fat girl to play the lead character, Tracy Turnblad, and a bunch of African-American kids to play the African-American kids. There are about a dozen roles for young black performers in this show, plus one for a big black…
You have 35 days to get that great play you’ve been writing finished and entered in the next Festival of Independent Theatres. FITfest, as it’s redundantly known, is the quirky-wonderful midsummer showcase of new plays and small theater companies, many of which don’t have their own home spaces to perform…
Playwright Sarah Ruhl, still in her 30s, is a favorite of the “edgy” theater companies around here. But why? Her plays are witless and obtuse, hardly worth producing, much less paying to see. Melancholy Play, one of her early works (from 2001), is on view now at Upstart Productions at…
“If a blind girl won’t love ugly people, who will?” That’s the central dilemma in Toxic Avenger, the eye-popping, knee-slapping, sci-fi musical comedy getting its Broadway tryout right now at Houston’s Alley Theatre. If the ugly person in question is “Toxie,” the avenging alter ego of mild-mannered nerd Melvin Ferd…
Two hundred bucks is nothing to laugh at — that’s equivalent to your electric and phone bill, or your rent if you live a very sad, unfunny life in the shadows of a relative’s basement with only a hot plate for snuggling. (Note: when snuggling appliances I’ve found it helps…
WaterTower Theatre puts on a splendidly versatile showcase for the performing arts each year called Out of the Loop Fringe Festival. It was given Best Theater Festival in Dallas for a reason, namely because its organizers have curated a menu of talent that is so delightfully experimental that you, the…
Most of the laughs from Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off come from action, not dialogue. The play has three acts of nonstop physical comedy including doors slamming, pants falling, and plates of sardines and fire axes juggled among actors with split-second precision. In lesser productions than the great one going…
Call a play a farce and it damn well better be funny. Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is far and away the farciest of all modern farces. Full of slamming doors, sexy girls, mistaken identities and stray plates of sardines, Noises Off has been setting the standard for feather-light theatrical comedy…
Everyone’s favorite brassy Golden Girl Betty White turns 90 today! In addition to squeezing in every cameo and roast that can possibly be wrinkled into a schedule, she’s also managed to helm the new (gotcha!) prank show Betty White’s Off Their Rockers. In it, rehearsed sketches are interspersed with spontaneous…
The other night at the end of a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank at WaterTower Theatre, the lights went down on the final scene then came up with the cast assembled for bows. Instead of applause, the actors were met with complete silence. The lights went down again…
Strap in for a serious two hours and 15 minutes of dark, talky religious drama in David Ives’ New Jerusalem, now onstage at Fort Worth’s Stage West. But what a great ride it is. The time, place and subject are set in the lengthy subtitle of the fact-based play: The…
The idea for this Sunday’s Stripper Spelling Bee at Baby Dolls was first created in Montreal a few years back and didn’t include professional dancers as contestants. Strip spelling’s father, scientist and medical illustrator Sherwin Tjia, just kinda thought it would be fun. His contest operated under basic framework: take…
“I want to go on living after my death,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary around the age of 14. She wanted to be a professional writer when she grew up, a novelist maybe. Her book, she said in the diary, would be based on the two years she spent…
Creating the wide open spaces and big skies of West Texas for a huge piece of musical theater has presented an interesting set of problems for designer Allen Moyer. Now finishing up the final details on the scenery for Dallas Theater Center’s production of the musical version of Edna Ferber’s…
