Something terrible befalls the title character in Edmond just before David Mamet’s terse little play begins. It’s not important what that terrible thing is. Mamet, as is his way, never tells. Best guesses—that Edmond’s been fired from his big job on Wall Street, that he’s had a nervous breakdown, that…
A great moment in theater can be as simple as a beam of light on an interesting face. Or it can come in the spectacle of a stage crowded with dancers whirling as music swells from a full orchestra. Dallas area stages in 2007 throbbed with memorable moments, large and…
With The Goodbye Girl, now playing at Theatre Three, it goes like this: Buy your ticket, sit down, wait four songs and fall in love. That’s exactly how long it takes for Dallas actor Gregory Lush to make his first entrance. And when he comes onstage and starts singing, dancing…
Ghosts of Christmas plays past are haunting Dallas theaters this season. So many playhouses are doing the same shows they did at the same time last year that reviewing them again feels like “OK, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties ’cause it’s cooooold out there.” That’s from…
Two new productions—Driving Miss Daisy at the Bath House Cultural Center and The Santaland Diaries at WaterTower’s Studio Theatre—affirm all the best reasons to go out to a play. Another, Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, also at the Bath House, serves as a 105-minute argument for renting…
One ghost is missing from this year’s production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at Dallas Theater Center. It is not the Ghost of Jacob Marley or of Christmases Past, Present or Yet to Come. They’re there in all their clinking, clanking glory. It is the ghost of former DTC…
The Widow Twankey is back! Theatre Britain’s annual “panto” production brings the silly old dame, played by a man in glam-drag, out front and center. This year she’s at her gawdy, bawdy best as portrayed by Dallas actor Mark Shum in Aladdin, now onstage for the hols at the KD…
The Boxer is brilliant. The locally grown one-act play that charmed audiences at last summer’s Festival of Independent Theatres is now at Dallas Children’s Theater, with the same cast and an even more polished staging by Dallas writer-director Matt Lyle. What a gem. In a lively 60 minutes, Lyle’s darling…
Everyone, audience included, visits hell in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the Stephen Adly Guirgis drama at Risk Theatre Initiative. The setting is a courtroom in purgatory. The trial could overturn the eternal damnation of the apostle who committed suicide after betraying Jesus Christ, the defense argument being, if…
We learn from failure, not from success!” wrote Bram Stoker in Dracula. If Irving’s ICT MainStage heeds that advice, director Bruce R. Coleman’s staging of the 1897 vampire saga, adapted by Seattle playwright Steven Dietz, will not have been in vain. Or vein. So much is right in the beginning…
No names are named in The Little Dog Laughed, a newish comedy now playing in the studio space at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. So go ahead and play fill-in-the-blank in the dilemma of a handsome Hollywood up-and-comer whose wholesome public image is at odds with his closeted personal life. Coming out…
Darn those neighborhood busybodies. Night of the Living Dead has returned for a Halloween season run at Dallas Children’s Theater, and the zombies just won’t take no for an answer. They’re all over the porch of the farmhouse filled with terrified townsfolk, and they’re not leaving till everyone’s dead. And…
David Mamet wastes no time getting down to business in Glengarry Glen Ross, onstage in a ferocious production right now at Dallas Theater Center. He goes to the dark side of the real estate business. Selling worthless tracts of land in Florida—parceled into “units” with made-up Scottish names that end…
Need a smile? Say Jeeves. No butler ever butled better than the one British-born humorist P.G. Wodehouse created as deadpan comic foil for ditzy upper-crust bachelor Bertie Wooster. The characters, and several silly companions, come gloriously, hilariously to the fore in the farcical Right Ho, Jeeves, now playing as the…
In his earlier plays, Killer Joe and Bug, writer Tracy Letts plundered the troubled lives of angry brutes and paranoid meth addicts, the sort of creepsters who dabble in homemade porn, homegrown reefer and homicide. So what’s he doing wasting his time and ours with the khaki-bland problems of Man…
Wayne Hudson and his accomplice-wife Scout are the Wal-Mart Bonnie and Clyde. Dubbed the “Mall Murderers” by media, the pair has shot, stabbed and strangled their way into the home of controversial film director Bruce Delamitri. He’s the Wal-Mart Quentin Tarantino. Without the wit. When we meet these characters in…
Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. That’s Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic “musical play” Carousel. In Lyric Stage’s majestic production, directed by Cheryl Denson, the Irving Arts Center’s acoustically generous Carpenter Performance Hall fills with waves of waltzes, ballets and ballads played by a full 40-piece orchestra. A dozen violins! Three violas! And nearly…
Don’t worry about what to wear to Dallas Theater Center’s season opener, Pride and Prejudice. By the last scene, your outfit will be out of style. At least it feels that way. Three hours is a long sit at any play. Three hours of the quaint jibber-jabber of Jane Austen’s…
You’ve got to climb to the top of Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls. That’s the opener of Jacqueline Susann’s crapgasmic 1966 novel, and the first words spoken in a new Valley of the Dolls theatrical adaptation now running at Uptown Players. Transporting this immortal phrase from page…
As likable as it is, Social Security suffers from a serious case of the coots. The two-act comedy by Andrew Bergman, now onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, wants to be a smart and witty farce about three generations of mother-daughter power struggles. What it is, however, is Golden Girls…
Think universally, laugh locally. Big themes come laced with oodles of hometown references in Heaven Forbid(s)!, the biting new comedy written by and starring Marco Rodriguez, now playing at the itty-bitty Ice House Cultural Center in Oak Cliff. It’s the first new show in two years from Rodriguez’s Martice Enterprises,…
Saw a strange new play about a handsome thief named Edward whose hands are amputated by court order. New ones are transplanted onto the stumps. The convicted thief is white. The recycled mitts are brown. The thief begins channeling the thoughts of the hands’ former owner, a Dalai Lama-like religious…
