Ever sat through a show thinking you’ve seen and heard it all before? The derivative tunes, the hackneyed lyrics. The creative duo Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart had–too many times–before deciding a few years ago to take out some comic revenge by writing the four-actor off-Broadway hit The Musical of…
Among the six actors in Nickel and Dimed, now playing at Kitchen Dog Theater, only the lead, Kristina Baker, is a member of the Actors’ Equity Association. That means something in this show that it might not in others. Nickel and Dimed is based on journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s nonfiction bestseller…
Miss Great Plains, Bonnie Louise Cutlett, looks as shaky as a lamb headed for slaughter. She steps forward during the “talent” round of the make-believe beauty competition called Pageant, now onstage at the Uptown Players, and shyly declaims her painfully original poem: “I am a handful of dirt! When you…
Funny how two shows about feeling bad turn out to be the feel-good musicals of the year so far. They’re all about heartache and despair and what it’s like when you’re so lonesome you could cry. And by doggies, if you don’t walk out of the things at the end…
Every new generation can glean fresh meaning from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Now onstage at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre in a stark but precisely rendered production directed by Terry Martin, the play never seems out of date. Such is its legacy as one of the finest tragedies of the 20th century…
Good live theater can work on you like a shot of joy juice. When everything clicks the way it did in Kitchen Dog Theater’s recent Cloud Tectonics or Jubilee Theatre’s current Diaries of a Barefoot Diva, you can’t wait to see another show so you can feel that magic buzz…
Rats, The Mousetrap is back. So is The Phantom of the Opera, that great and glorious hunk of cheese from the grand vizier of musical cheddar, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. The former is onstage at Theatre Three; the latter has parked its high-fat touring production in the Music Hall at…
Who knew Macbeth could be so hot? Theatre Britain, that plucky little company so skilled at staging farces and Christmas pantos for the kiddies, now brings forth Shakespeare’s bloodiest play in a production at the Trinity River Arts Center that strips away everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. That includes the…
Writer, director, producer and actor Tyler Perry wins the perfect attendance award. The plays and movies featuring his cross-dressing alter ego, Madea, have become runaway box-office hits with black women older than 35, raking in more than $155 million over the past several years. Three performances of his latest show,…
Out in Plano, on the big stage at Collin County Community College, you’ve got The Rocky Horror (Puppet) Show, a loud, dirty, sexy, glorious rock musical that casts dozens of live actors alongside the sort manipulated by strings, rods and other mechanical contraptions. Over at Dallas Theater Center, there’s I…
“Just a little touch of star quality” is how the chorus of peasants describes the title character in Evita, just opened by Lyric Stage at the Irving Arts Center. It’s one of the slyest jokes in the 1975 Webber-Rice rock opera, which depicts the rise of Eva Duarte Peron, young…
Aida the grand opera by Giuseppe Verdi and Aida the Elton John/Tim Rice rock musical now running at the Uptown Players have one thing in common. One thing, that is, besides the title, the setting (Egypt at the time of the pharaohs) and the love triangle involving handsome navy captain…
Somebody at the Richardson Theatre Centre has been watching late-night Cinemax. Director Regan Adair’s production of Christopher Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons throbs with passion, a three-hour make-out marathon replete with pretty babes in clingy lingerie, a courtesan who lets her lady lump double as a writing desk and a virgin who…
Say you get some fine pâté de foie gras. You spread a big dollop of it on a thick, crusty slice of warm French baguette along with generous slivers of rare black truffle. First-class ingredients all the way around. Gourmet grub. But when you think about it, when you break…
Urinetown is running at the WaterTower Theatre. Perfect. What a relief that it’s such a wonderful production. Otherwise the next few paragraphs of this review would overflow with wordplay about the show going into the dumper or not being worth two shakes. Instead, let it be said that this Urinetown…
Besides being Friday the 13th, the opening night performance of The Women, the Clare Boothe Luce comedy at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, unfolded under a big, fat full moon. With 19 actresses playing the 42 women’s roles (there are no men in the show), that’s risking the hormonal equivalent of…
What started four years ago as a one-night-only fundraiser for the upstart Uptown Players has evolved into such a sell-out event that they now stretch Broadway Our Way over two weekends. This year’s edition, subtitled Divas Unleashed, is a ferociously fun celebration of the theater’s previous season that invites cast…
In the beginning, Children of Eden looks like it might have a prayer. What else would you expect from a show that stars God? Adam, Eve and their kids make an appearance. Noah and his bunch come with herds of animals played by adorable young’uns with paper plates and Dixie…
Christmas may come but once a year, but Clive and Belinda hope to do so several times–and under the tree, no less–in Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s bitter farce, Season’s Greetings. In the sparkly, punch-drunk production on view at Collin County Community College’s Quad C Theatre, these two characters–dishy single novelist Clive…
Boys will be girls in the British “panto” tradition, carried on again this holiday season by Theatre Britain in their intentionally over-the-top and utterly delightful production of Jack and the Beanstalk. The Brits do love putting actors in women’s wear. In panto (short for pantomime, though the silent aspects of…
“There is no amendment against same-sex comedy,” warns comic actor Paul J. Williams in his introduction to another performance by Queertown, the seven-member comedy troupe that commands the stage at the West End Comedy Theatre. They’re gay, all right, this bunch of giddies. It’s just that not all of them…
They talk, we listen. Stripped down to basics, that’s live theater. And in two new productions–the warm and funny Visiting Mr. Green at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas and the eerily prescient Humpty Dumpty at Second Thought Theatre (relocated to Addison)–the actors do the talking part so well that we in…
