Yes, he flies. Superman, an American icon in blazing blue tights, red cape and sassy leather boots, soars into view and lands like a muscle-queen Peter Pan on the stage of the Wyly Theatre. In Dallas Theater Center’s bright, funny, downright inspiring remake of the 1966 musical It’s a Bird…It’s…
Fluids of all sorts have cameo roles in Zayd Dohrn’s soggy new play, Long Way Go Down, getting its debut production in Kitchen Dog Theater’s current New Works Festival. In the small, spare office of a Phoenix trucking outfit where most of the drama happens, buckets catch steady leaks from…
The most moving of three musicals that have just opened on Dallas stages is the little one with no orchestra, only two characters and a collection of songs, performed mostly a cappella, that never won a single Tony. It’s Black Pearl Sings!, now playing at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. More than…
“I never knew what true happiness was till I got married. By then it was too late.” Good line. And if you didn’t know you were watching The Dixie Swim Club, a comedy about five women renewing their friendship at an annual North Carolina beach weekend, you might think you…
Scarlet fever, blindness, a blizzard and a crop-killing fire hit the Ingalls family in Little House on the Prairie, The Musical. And that’s just the first act. These hearty pioneers respond to disaster after disaster in typically hearty (theater) pioneer fashion—by singing spirited ballads and engaging in thigh-slapping yeehaw dancing…
Nine innings of baseball can go three hours easy, so it’s remarkable that Most Valuable Player, a play about Jackie Robinson’s first three seasons in the majors, manages to work in spring training, a couple of World Series and an All-Star game in 70 minutes flat. The production at Dallas…
Dallas Opera’s triumphant world premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick is so un-opera in the traditional sense that it’s easier to describe it as new epic cinema in 3-D. With live actors. And lots of singing. About three hours’ worth, all aboard the Pequod in search of the mythical Great White…
“Give Them What They Want” is the first number in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and the current entertainment model of Uptown Players, the company presenting the area’s first local production of the show. Giving the Uptown audience—a mostly middle-aged, predominantly gay male crowd of dedicated theatergoers—what they want means the occasional…
The pretty girl gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop in reasons to be pretty, the third and last installment in Dallas Theater Center’s ongoing trilogy of Neil LaBute’s Beauty Plays. In the first two—The Shape of Things and Fat Pig—the good-lookers have all the power. But in pretty, directed…
Funny how these dead writers keep coughing up new plays. Shakespeare’s got one, Cardenio, confirmed by British scholars earlier this year as a script the Bard based on Don Quixote. It was produced briefly during Shakespeare’s lifetime, then lost, only to be rediscovered recently by literary sleuths who found similar…
Nothing depicts teenagers’ lives with less authenticity than the typical musical about teenagers’ lives. Think about the kids in shows like High School Musical, Hairspray, and even Grease and Bye Bye Birdie, all populated with nuance-free, dumbed-down stereotypes. You get your studs and duds, preps and debs, sluts and hoods,…
Meet the burnouts of Burnfield, USA. The young adults of Eric Bogosian’s play subUrbia, now being done by Upstart Productions at The Green Zone, have turned the curbside at their local convenience store into an ersatz salon. They hang there every night and sometimes on toward dawn, drinking, smoking and…
A slab of Velveeta with Miracle Whip on a slice of white bread. For 90-year-old Grace, that’s a happy meal. That’s also a pretty accurate description of Tom Ziegler’s two-hander play Grace and Glorie, a soft, bland sandwich of comedy and pathos, and the latest effort by One Thirty Productions…
Neil LaBute and Nora Ephron. Now there’s a cage match waiting to happen. LaBute, the reigning American writer of terse stage and screen dramedies about women who love men who hate women, wrote one, The Shape of Things, about a man-hating woman who does to one nice guy what LaBute’s…
When Equus, a 1974 play by Peter Shaffer, returned to Broadway in 2008 after a successful revival in London, the sensation surrounding the stage debut of movie star Daniel Radcliffe—Harry Potter! Nude!—in the role of deranged, horse-killing teen Alan Strang, outshone the play itself. And for good reason. Turns out…
Theater provides its own version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. By observing an actor in performance, we, the audience, unwittingly change the behavior of that actor as he or she plays the part. It’s an apt metaphorical fit to the experience of watching Michael Frayn’s dazzling, difficult play Copenhagen, currently running…
Where would you rather be at the end of the world? In an underground bunker with a nervous gay biologist and not quite enough food? Or in a living room with Stephen Hawking and a plate of pastrami? We get the lighter side of Armageddon in two small, odd, funny…
Sometimes the sweet nobility of a heartfelt community theater production can make its flaws forgivable. At all-volunteer playhouses such as Richardson Theatre Centre and Onstage in Bedford, where this week’s shows were reviewed, they do it all for love. Nobody receives star treatment. There’s no complicated scenery, and they sport…
Legally Blonde meets Glee meets Xanadu in Dallas Theater Center’s latest, the world premiere of the hyperactive musical Give It Up! (forced exclamation point theirs). The show reflects obvious influences of those and other pop-infused Broadway and TV phenoms, but its actual source material is Lysistrata, a comedy from 411…
“This situation is fraught.” It is, it is, it is. August: Osage County, the Steppenwolf production finishing its two-week run at the Winspear Opera House, is a festival of fraught-ness. Tracy Letts’ prize-laden three-act masterpiece finds the Weston family of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, about as frightfully fraught as any family ought…
Nobody ever accused Pocket Sandwich Theatre of being too sophisticated. Tucked into the corner of a shopping strip across from Mockingbird Station, the cozy little dinner playhouse serves terrible food and puts on plays aimed at beer-and-nacho appetites. Pocket’s latest, Fangs for the Memories, revives one of its old comedy…
The most exciting moment in a show done by Pegasus Theatre is that first glimpse of the set and actors as the curtain goes up. Performed in the company’s trademarked “Living Black and White,” Pegasus’ tributes to vintage whodunit movies are designed to fool the eye of the viewer into…
