The Texas Theatre began screening the Dallas TV series at the end of March, but this week, the new-found tradition ended abruptly — with a voicemail, two faxes, and two emails from Warner Bros. ordering theater employees to “cease and desist” the screenings because of copyright laws. The Texas Theatre…
Theater Caps are bite-sized punch-packing capsule reviews by resident theater critic Elaine Liner. Use them as a reminder — or a teaser, if you procrastinate — of her full-length reviews in The Mixmaster’s weekly sister. There is one visually stunning image in UTD professor Thomas Riccio’s new play blahblah, now…
Turnaround time from Broadway to Dallas is getting shorter. The AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Lexus Broadway Series has just added the current Lincoln Center and West End hit play War Horse to its 2012-’13 season at the Winspear Opera House. The play, currently up for five Tony Awards, has become…
If things are unusually quiet on some local stages right now, it’s because most of the biggest, baddest voices in Dallas musical theater are singing like mad in Broadway Our Way, the annual fundraising revue at Oak Lawn’s Uptown Players. The cast is an all-star lineup of area divas and…
Flamenco is on fire in this town starting May 11 at Central Market stores as part of their Pasaporte Espana event celebrating the food and culture of Spain. Who knew that flamenco, the sexy Spanish dance with gypsy roots, has been building a big following here over the past five…
Comedian Mike Epps, known for his roles in The Hangover, Friday After Next and new flick Jumping the Broom, was performing to a full house at Grand Prarie’s Verizon Theater on Friday night when things got not-so-funny. A few minutes into his stand-up act a plainclothes peace officer swept across…
Life may be a cabaret, old chum, but Cabaret onstage is not Cabaret the 1972 Bob Fosse movie. The sprawling, super-sized Cabaret that just opened at the Dallas Theater Center downtown is its own animal, an irresistibly sexy beast, even when it’s indulging in wretched excess and heavy-handed messages. Get…
In the geometry of a love triangle, the three sides are rarely equal. Somebody has to be the hypotenuse, loving the wrong person, giving too much or too little. Red Light Winter, the steamy three-character play by Adam Rapp that just opened a scorching-good production at Addison’s Second Thought Theatre,…
With a little help from her friends, the title character in Theatre Nouveau 47’s silly, sometimes thrilling Alice in Wonderland and Other Hallucinations takes a high-flying tumble down the rabbit hole. Using the dreamlike, no-frills adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s stories by Andre Gregory and The Manhattan Project, the little company…
Bring on the Mamet. Cue up some Neil LaBute. Somebody, quick, stage something full of cussin’ and screwin’ and gettin’ all nekkid. A month into the ongoing Horton Foote Festival on local stages, the surfeit of antimacassars and rocking chairs in these folksy, G-rated works is wearing me to a…
A splendid play happens offstage during Horton Foote’s Pulitzer-winning The Young Man from Atlanta, now running at Uptown Players at the Kalita Humphreys Theater. If only the action out front were as entertaining as the stuff we never see. Throughout this static little drama, the latest entry in the ongoing…
Before the hunky undead teens of Twilight, there were the hunky immortal brothers of Tuck Everlasting, the 1975 young adult novel by Natalie Babbitt. The popular book was adapted for the stage by Mark J. Frattaroli and in the lovely production now running at Dallas Children’s Theater, the story focuses…
Where there’s a will, there’s a way for greedy family members to fight about who gets what and how much. In Horton Foote’s internecine 1989 comedy Dividing the Estate, members of the Gordon family also want to know how soon they’ll get their mitts on their mama’s money. The sooner…
Theatre Three’s downstairs dungeon Theatre Too is exactly the right space in which to stage Christopher Durang’s semi-absurd political satire Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. In the play’s disturbing, dystopian world, the only safe place to be is a windowless bunker safely out of the…
WaterTower Theatre’s tenth annual Out of the Loop Fringe Festival is a busy buffet of talent spread among three venues at the sprawling Addison venue. You can gorge yourself on all the offerings over 11 days, or just pick and choose, nibbling among the ones you’ve heard are good. With…
In ancient times, there were “air hostesses.” If you have never been through an airport without being forced to remove footwear, you are too young to remember pretty armies of exotic airline goddesses in kicky miniskirts and calf-hugging boots. They were the go-go geishas of international travel, stirring cocktails and…
They’re up to new tricks at Matthew Posey’s Ochre House theater, that odd little hotbox of freakishly entertaining original work written, directed by and starring Mr. Posey. His latest is Memphos!, a 90-minute look at the last performance of the last-worst act in old-timey vaudeville. Posey plays the title character,…
Dallas Theater Center has done the only reasonable thing it could to make that nuttiest of old chestnuts, Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, bearable. In the leads are two big Broadway stars, Tony winner (and Fort Worth native) Betty Buckley and four-time Tony nominee Tovah Feldshuh. That…
This week’s big event over at the shiny barn in Arlington is all about possession of the pigskin, right? Coincidentally, Dallas Children’s Theater, named by Time magazine one of the country’s top five professional theaters for young audiences, has a stage filled with porkers. And one really unhappy wolf. DCT…
Deconstruct the features of Dallas actor Steven Walters and it’s hard to believe they constitute the attributes of a great stage performer. There’s his voice: high, a little nasal, with a hint of Texas twang and audible hisses on sibilant consonants. There’s his chin, strong but soft. His long nose…
As a cultural, historical icon exploited for stage and screen, Frankenstein’s Monster is right up there with Jesus, Abe Lincoln and Santa Claus. You know the Monster at first glance: bolts through the neck, Cro Magnon forehead, ugly shoes. With a vocabulary limited to “fire bad!” and “friend good!,” he…
Feels good to start the theater year with some laughs. First show of 2011, Death Is No Small Change!, is right on the money. It’s the new comedy from Pegasus Theatre, now performing its yearly three-week run at the Eisemann Center in Richardson. There’s nothing like a Pegasus show and…
