Funny how the little moments in some plays stay with you. An actor wiping a tear from his cheek in a quiet scene in Our Town. That same actor, Joey Folsom, angrily tearing through a package of Oreos in subUrbia. Estelle Parsons reeling down the stairs in August: Osage County…
For the past few months at Dallas Theater Center, Mark Hadley was forgotten but not gone. He announced last July that after 10 years as managing director of the city’s largest professional theater, he would be leaving for a new job. But he stayed mum about what the new gig…
“I hate theater,” a whiny voice in the dark says at the tippy-top of The Drowsy Chaperone. “Well, it’s so disappointing, isn’t it?” The Man in Chair, as he’s called in this creampuff of a musical, continues for a few more lines before the lights come up. He expresses his…
You can’t swing an elf without hitting a Christmas-themed play or musical in Dallas theaters this week. And for swinging elves, there’s no better one than Crumpet, the sassy alter ego of writer David Sedaris in his one-man comedy short, The Santaland Diaries. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas has produced this…
The leading role in Kitchen Dog Theater’s Charm fits actress Tina Parker like a velvet glove. But the character she plays, 19th century writer, feminist and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, wasn’t the glove-wearing sort, though she lived in glove-and-corset-wearing times. Kathleen Cahill’s immensely satisfying 90-minute biographical comedy, getting its Southwest premiere…
Except for the title and some dropped-in references to Parkland Hospital, Neiman Marcus and the long-gone H.L. Green downtown five-and-dime, the setting of The Trinity River Plays feels as geographically generic as the towns do in daytime soaps. So scant is the sense of Dallas-ness in Regina Taylor’s new trilogy…
“Play should make you understand something new,” says a character in Nilaja Sun’s brief, beautiful play, No Child. Good plays can enlighten. Bad plays can, too, even if it’s only teaching you something about remaining politely silent and relatively still in a small, hard seat for a couple of hours…
Every night of live theater is an adventure. When things go right, it’s a thrill ride. When things go wrong, as they did at the final preview of Lyric Stage’s premiere of the musical adaptation of The Night of the Hunter, it’s like stumbling through a carnival fun house. The…
What are you up for? A play about a guy who shoots a dog? A play about yuppie parents who poison a lady with pesto? How about a comedy with typists who murder lumberjacks to score men’s better-made outerwear? Let’s start with the most entertaining one (by far), The Secretaries,…
The Edward Albee one-acts that WingSpan Theatre Company is doing right now taste as bitter and icy as dry martinis. The American Dream and The Sandbox, both directed by Susan Sargeant, are bracing cocktails of absurdist humor. The production at the Bath House Cultural Center serves them with great style…
A farting contest in the middle of Shrek the Musical turns out to be one of its classiest moments. The competition takes place between the title character, an okra-colored ogre played by Eric Petersen, and the object of his affection, a rescued red-haired princess named Fiona (Haven Burton). In the…
A full moon bathes a window in sugary white. A train whistles. Bacon curls in a skillet. These simple sensory references are part of everyday life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the United States, Western Hemisphere, the Earth, the solar system, the universe—the way one character addresses the fictional village…
What Hamlet says about mothers and sons, Henry IV says about fathers (and father figures) and sons. Shakespeare’s drama about medieval kings, now getting a handsome, if gimmick-strewn, production at Dallas Theater Center, presents a troubled royal son, Hal, the Prince of Wales, and his uneasy relationships with his father…
The bigger the show, the smaller the revival. Vintage American musicals keep getting make-unders on Broadway. The trend began with 2005’s Sweeney Todd, a shoestring affair imported from London that forced the cast to double as the onstage “orchestra.” Star Patti Lupone awkwardly blew into a tuba. And thus diminished,…
The season of farce is upon us. Two more big comedies have just opened for grins: Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps at Fort Worth’s Stage West and Unnecessary Farce at Pocket Sandwich Theatre. They join the still-running, lavishly funny Bach at Leipzig at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre (through September 18)…
Like so many of the plays produced at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the new one by Ed Graczyk called The Blue Moon Dancing is just Steel Magnolias by another name. Contemporary Theatre did Steel Magnolias earlier this year. It seems as if they do it every year. They put on…
When they’re up and dancing, A Bollywood Lysistrata, a new piece by Level Ground Arts in their new home at KD Studio Theatre, feels as fresh and salty-sweet as the cool Indian yogurt drink known as lassi. If only they could have danced all night. It’s the standing-around-talking parts that…
Sherlock Holmes as hottie? Theatre Three has him in actor Chuck Huber, starring as the title character in Sherlock Holmes in the Crucifer of Blood. With a seriously stylish steampunk-influenced production directed by Jeffrey Schmidt, Dallas’ oldest theater-in-the-round dares not to be square (for once). And at the center of…
The naked truth is, The Full Monty is a cock tease. You won’t see the full anything in this gently ribald musical, now onstage at Addison’s WaterTowerTheatre. The working-stiff characters who band together for a one-night-only all-male strip act promise to take it all off, but the big finale of…
Going to the annual Festival of Independent Theatres is a bit like tumbling down Alice’s rabbit hole. You jump in and hope for amusing diversions on the way to a soft landing. For four weeks, eight small theater companies, so small they don’t have their own home spaces in which…
By the time the ladies of Theatre Too’s Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage start sawing up the body of a villainous Ukrainian drug dealer named Black Dog, the strange charms of this outrageous piece of grindhouse comedy will have firmly grabbed hold of your senses. Not known for taking…
Exploding with forced fabulosity, the national tour of Dreamgirls currently at the Music Hall at Fair Park lifts the 1981 musical into the realm of high-tech spectacle. Visually, it’s a stunner. Spanning the stage are revolving walls of LED lights on designer Robin Wagner’s enormous, industrial-grid set. These become giant…
