That devil, always messing with the details, like a naughty kitten who won’t be deterred from pawing a flower arrangement. With the slightest curious swipe of the paw, the whole thing comes crashing down. It’s much like what happened during the first weekend of this year’s Festival of Independent Theatres,…
Mamma Mia!, defying critical drubbings for half a decade, has been called a Twinkie of a musical. But that’s an insult to spongy Hostess snack cakes that have stood the test of time. Think of it as more of a theatrical baklava: layers of tissue-thin story line piled one atop…
What fools these mortals be. And what fun the revival of Randy Tallman and Steven Mackenroth’s rock comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Musical, now alternating through the summer with a more conventional Tempest at Shakespeare Dallas’ outdoor East Dallas venue. It’s been some 30 years since this version of…
Less is more entertaining in the perversely spare little oddity called Thom Pain (based on nothing), playing in the intimate Bryant Hall at Dallas Theater Center. Clocking in under an hour, Will Eno’s one-man one-act unfolds in a nearly bare space (just a red chair nobody sits in and a…
The day after seeing Stanton’s Garage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, I visited an aunt and uncle who are up in years. They’d just been out in 100-degree heat to have their 1994 Toyota Camry inspected, and it had been an ordeal. The car has only 38,000 miles on it…
You could call The Illusion a comedy. You could call ipecac an after-dinner liqueur. That doesn’t make those descriptions accurate. The Illusion is Dallas Theater Center artistic director Richard Hamburger’s bitter dose of theatrical medicine after the tasty fun of Hank Williams: Lost Highway, a jukebox musical audiences loved so…
Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning drama now playing at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, tells a “What if?” story. Several, in fact. What if a major league baseball player–not just any player but a superstar–announces in the middle of a winning season that he’s gay? And what if the team needs…
The Steel Magnolias are in bloom again. Robert Harling’s all-woman 1987 play, full of sap, sass and silliness, is a favorite of regional theaters large and small. Despite its hokey writing and its jolting second-act turn from light comedy to weepy tragedy, it’s a popular, versatile piece. Like Southern women’s…
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…
