The least important theme in Alan Bennett’s wonderful play The History Boys is that a great teacher can also be a bad person. Hector, an overweight, 60ish instructor at a lower-tier English college prep for boys, is a popular eccentric who believes in the power of big ideas and the…
The stripper alone should make Patrick Marber’s play Closer a red-hot ticket. The character’s name is Alice Ayres, and in a scene in the second act, she performs a seductive dance for a man named Larry. In the debut production by Enter Stage Left, in residence at Teatro Dallas, the…
Careers of baseball players and playwrights have more in common than you might think. Both professions have major and minor playing fields. Both require a consistent string of hits to be considered successful. And the end game is elevation to the “big show” that could mean money, awards and fame…
Old television shows never die; they stubbornly live on in cable reruns, DVD boxed sets, online and now as theatrical productions. Like popular movies, from Sunset Boulevard to Shrek, that have been made over into Broadway musicals, some of TV’s best-loved series are returning repurposed as stage material. And why…
Two shows in a row, Kitchen Dog Theater has picked plays about older men having carnal relations with animals. In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, produced at KDT last fall, a well-to-do Manhattan husband fell in love and lust with a four-legged woolly mammal with big, soulful…
Goodbye, winter blues. Hello Human Female, springing from the wildly funny imagination of Texas playwright Matt Lyle, arrives as a late Valentine to the willy-nilly silliness of love among lovable misfits. In its world premiere by Audacity Theatre Lab at the tiny Ochre House Theatre next to Fair Park, Lyle’s…
Not a bad time to invest in an entertainment stimulus package. Two just-opened shows are pretty fair bets, paying off with a high percentage of laughs at the expense of a few morally bankrupt characters. At Uptown Players is the Southwest premiere of Del Shores’ The Trials and Tribulations of…
A little bit of Walton’s Mountain, a sprinkling of Horton Foote, a dash of Tennessee Williams and you’re on Last Train to Nibroc, the first play in Arlene Hutton’s charming, evocative Nibroc Trilogy. Echo Theatre is presenting all three plays in rolling repertory this month at the Bath House Cultural…
In the beginning, there was the word. And it was the playwright’s. And the actors said the word. And the audience watched and heard the word. And if the word was good, the audience clapped and stood and felt justified for spending $60 a ticket and missing Larry King. So…
Violet Sherlock’s Last Case Plenty of musicals tell the story of an ugly girl yearning to be pretty. My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, The Apple Tree, Carnival, 110 in the Shade and most recently Shrek the Musical feature ugly ducklings longing for swanhood. How they get there usually requires the…
The annual evening of folderol known as Broadway Our Way started out several years ago at Uptown Players as a tossed-together two-night fund-raiser with a cute twist. Performers from the company’s previous season’s shows would sing and dance, with the women taking on Broadway tunes written for men and the…
Death never takes a holiday in the plays of Martin McDonagh. It’s always right there in the room, or at least close by, lurking, stalking. He populates his scripts with nasty old ladies, drunken louts and bad-tempered cops—potential murderers all. Insanely funny conversations about trivial matters erupt into bitter confrontations…
In Dallas theater, 2008 was the year Jersey Boys jerked audiences to their feet at Fair Park, an all-drag Facts of Life became the must-see hit of the summer and William Ayers’ son, playwright Zayd Dohrn, premiered his 9/11 paranoia comedy, Sick, at Kitchen Dog Theater. It was the year…
As the Tina Fey of the 17th century, Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz wrote sly comedy that by all accounts cracked up audiences in the parlors and palaces of Mexican viceroys and Spanish nobility. Her works for the stage made light of then-popular cloak-and-dagger love triangles and boldly satirized…
What a shame that Ebenezer Scrooge didn’t have a gentleman’s gentleman like Jeeves at his side. Scrooge’s forced march to personal redemption might not have been necessary, and his earlier years would have been less wasted and considerably more fun. Jeeves’ employer, society gadabout Bertie Wooster, certainly seems to enjoy…
In a cage match, Crumpet the Elf could kick the cranberries off Ebenezer Scrooge and still have the energy to stomp Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Christmas Past. Don’t mess with Crumpet, the nom de Noel of writer David Sedaris. His mean and funny chronicle of time served as…
Ignorance, poverty, greed, forgiveness—the themes of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol are particularly relevant at this moment. What makes a classic a classic is that it has something to say to every generation, and though the annual production at Dallas Theater Center is almost identical to last year’s—including the return…
Seesawing between vicious satire and fawning tribute, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant offers a disarmingly funny lesson in the finer points of Dianetics. Directed by Jaime Castañeda and performed by eight cute kid actors at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, the show takes a mere 55 minutes and 11…
Just in time for the holiday season comes a play about a man having sex with a goat. Leave it to Kitchen Dog Theater, never ones for plum-pudding entertainment, to plop Edward Albee’s unnerving The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in our midst while everyone else is going with tinsel…
On November 4, Topdog/Underdog became a period piece. Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer winner about black brothers named Lincoln and Booth—their father’s idea of a joke and Parks’ method of foreshadowing their fate—is only 7 years old. But in our post-election Age of Re-Enlightenment, the play’s nihilistic view of the thwarted status…
A neon portrait of its composer-lyricist smiles down on Make Me a Song: The Music of William Finn, now playing in WaterTower Theatre’s studio space. Bald, bearded and over 50, Finn isn’t a pretty man in the flesh, much less in neon light, but he sure writes pretty tunes. In…
Lower your expectations a notch for Theatre Three’s production of the 2005 hit Broadway musical The Light in the Piazza. That way you won’t be too disappointed at the less-than-sumptuous staging of the romantic, near-operatic 16-song suite by composer-lyricist Adam Guettel (book by Craig Lucas). You might even be pleasantly…
