Questions about art, race, ethics and language spark passionate arguments in the provocative new play Permanent Collection, currently the main-stage offering at Kitchen Dog Theater’s sixth annual New Works Festival. In an elegantly designed and smartly acted production directed by Dan Day, the Thomas Gibbons drama challenges its characters (and…
Cocktail hour extends to nearly three in WaterTower Theatre’s bouncy, boozy production of Company. The Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical finds a group of five upscale married couples gathering for the 35th birthday of bachelor Bobby (Donald Fowler), a 1970s Manhattan playboy with an aversion to settling down. Everybody sings, and…
It’s hard not to like a show that raffles off chess pies at intermission. Pump Boys and Dinettes, now playing at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, is its own big sticky slice of American pie. A Broadway hit with its original cast of songwriter-performers in the early 1980s, the revue featuring…
Marie Jones’ 1999 Irish comedy Stones in His Pockets, the final production of Theatre Three’s current subscription season, turns out to be this theater’s best in many a moon. About time, too. This company has limped through the past year with a lineup of plays that were ill-chosen (Arsenic and…
Truth is, from the female perspective, all men are fixer-uppers. There’s always at least one thing he does wrong that, were he to fix it according to our instructions, he’d be just about perfect. Like that guy who wears tasseled loafers with shorts. A simple repair. Or the otherwise lovely…
“It’s a maaaaaarvelous script,” says radiant screen queen Mary Dale of her role as Lady Godiva in a big-budget bio-pic set in the 11th century. “Really illuminates those troubled times. And we have some terrific musical numbers.” Dale, sleeker than Lana Turner, sweeter than Doris Day, is playwright Charles Busch’s…
A man and woman sit in a living room. She’s a pretty blonde. He’s well-dressed but mushy around the midsection. Good paintings hang on the wall behind them. The soft beige leather sofa and two pale chairs positioned just so make a visual statement about the couple’s social status (high)…
Heavier almost than the mood-setting smoke hanging over the Kalita Humphreys stage for the Fats Waller musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ is the sense of irony that the Dallas Theater Center would choose this show as the follow-up to Topdog/Underdog. Back in March, the theater staged a top-notch production of Suzan-Lori Parks’…
The actors in Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes or The Green Pill, now playing at The MAC, are made up to look like human marionettes. They move with deliberate, jerky gestures, as if their limbs are manipulated by invisible strings. Their faces are painted chalky white, cheeks circled with bright…
When Sheran Goodspeed-Keyton sings, the little hairs on the backs of your wrists start to quiver. Her magnificent voice can split the heavens and move an audience to tears. In Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues, now onstage at Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre, her performance in the starring role seems…
“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…
