“Do you have any idea what it’s like being English?” John Cleese asked in A Fish Called Wanda. “Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing…We’re all terrified of embarrassment.” Understanding that particularly English phobia regarding public humiliation helps explain why…
Like many a drinking binge, James McLure’s evening of companion comedies Lone Star and Laundry and Bourbon starts slowly, picks up momentum and ends with a boisterous, boozy crescendo. Now onstage in a cracking production directed by Cynthia Hestand at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the pair of related one-acts takes…
The Devil is in the details in plays sharing the three stages at WaterTower Theatre’s annual Out of the Loop Festival in Addison. He’s also a big influence on some of the plots. Take Baptized to the Bone, a strange, uneven Southern gothic farce written by Dave Johnson, directed by…
When a playwright writes a loaded gun into the first act, Anton Chekhov noted, it had better be fired by the fourth. Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ 2002 Pulitzer-winning drama now onstage at the Dallas Theater Center, has two acts, two characters and one gun. Fewer than five minutes of act one…
In many productions of Shanghai Moon, the Charles Busch comedy now playing at Pocket Sandwich Theatre, the leading character, Lady Sylvia Allington, is played by a man. Busch played the part himself in a successful off-Broadway revival not long ago. At the Pocket, a lady, Trista Wyly, plays the Lady,…
Arthur Miller’s powerful drama All My Sons, now drawing gasps and tears from audiences riveted by Classical Acting Company’s production at Richland College, was written during wartime. It concerns a family wrestling with the postwar realization that the father’s success as a defense contractor during World War II was the…
Poignant ugliness pervades The Life, the tuneful musical about prostitutes and pimps. The show is now onstage at the Trinity River Arts Center in an eye-popping regional premiere produced by the Uptown Players. The year is 1980. The place is pre-Disneyfied 42nd Street. Under the glow of porn theater marquees,…
Put on a show called The Wild Party and it darn well better be. Anything less is like inviting hungry friends to a smorgasbord and serving them TV dinners. For a few minutes at the beginning of The Wild Party they’re throwing over at Theatre Three, there are appetizing hints…
Based on the 1996 movie, The Spitfire Grill serves up theatrical comfort food set to a pleasant, bluegrassy score by James Valcq and Fred Alley. The six-voice, seven-character musical, now running at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, is as warm and wholesome as a plate of home-cooked meat loaf and gravy. Predictable,…
Playing a character named The Maniac, actor Robert Dorfman calmly announces to the audience at Dallas Theater Center that he will serve as the “tour guide” through the zigs and zags of Dario Fo’s political satire Accidental Death of an Anarchist. That’s an understatement. Moments after the lights go up…
Mention Waiting for Godot and you will often get the sigh and the eye roll. Oh, that old thing. What is it about anyway? What does it mean? It’s weird. It’s long. It makes no sense. The eye-rollers do have a point. Godot playwright Samuel Beckett provides a pretty accurate…
Producing live theater isn’t a crapshoot. It’s a poker game. You have to bet big to win big. But a big payoff in regional and community theater usually means just breaking even. Few companies end up in the chips during a season. More often, they lose their puffy shirts. Even…
Dallas theatergoers can be aggressively vocal with their opinions. Some audience members open their gobs and offer audible reviews of a show while a performance is in progress. This sort of behavior may be appropriate at a gladiator ring or topless revue, but it is generally frowned upon at an…
Somewhere Lawrence Welk is smiling. This holiday season there’s ah-one and ah-two oldies musical revues on the boards, each offering Welkified close-harmony classics and G-rated tributes to jukebox eras gone by. Forever Plaid at Plano Repertory Theatre weaves pop hits from the ’50s and early ’60s into a threadbare story…
Bad things happen in trailer parks. Between tornados, they’re magnets for human mayhem. Any episode of Cops finds a squad car rolling into some trailer park where a half-drunk, goggle-eyed good-for-nothing will be escorted in cuffs out of an aluminum double-wide as his teenage girlfriend sobs in the background, snot-smeared…
Disturbing, daring, exceedingly funny, The Danube takes dark, unexpected turns. This fascinating one-act, now onstage in a sharply directed and well-acted production at Kitchen Dog Theater, begins with a deceptively conventional theatrical setup: Two men at a cafe table in 1938 Budapest chat amiably about weather, clean streets and movies…
Each scene in The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild, now onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, is introduced with a cutesy caption projected on a screen. “Somewhere in Wyoming,” it’ll say in white Courier font on a black background, or “Busted flat in Babylon.” Tennessee Williams first used this…
Beneath the jagged scars on the heaving chest of Dr. Frankenstein’s scary monster beats the heart of a true romantic. Just whose heart it is–or used to be–we can’t be sure. The giant creature is a crazy quilt of random body parts stitched together by a mad scientist and brought…
‘Tis pity Mother is a whore. That’s the theme of George Bernard Shaw’s drawing-room drama Mrs. Warren’s Profession, now getting a sprightly production at Theatre Three. Mother is Kitty Warren, wealthy, middle-aged owner of a chain of bawdy “private hotels” across Europe. Her adult daughter, Vivie, has been kept in…
In Kiss of the Spider Woman, the haunting Kander and Ebb musical now running at the Trinity River Arts Center, two men share a tiny prison cell in Argentina. Molina (Donald Fowler) is doing three years for sex with an underage boy. The ironically named Valentin Paz (Skie Ocasio) has…
Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins takes aim at the American dream and blows it to smithereens. The strangely hypnotic musical, now onstage in an excellent production at Quad C Theatre at Collin County Community College, imagines a surreal reunion of four killers of presidents and five who tried. Existing together on a…
At a recent performance of Hamlet at the Dallas Theater Center, the temperature inside the Kalita Humphreys Theater was so cold the ushers were doubling as Sherpas. They handed out small fuzzy wraps to ticket-holders who hadn’t anticipated subzero chill. At intermission, they short-roped half-frozen audience members back up the…
