Squeezing Wagner’s four-opera, 17-hour Der Ring des Nibelungen down to two hours and 20 minutes leaves no room for the fire-breathing dragon. For Das Barbecü, a two-act spoof of the operas now onstage at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, composer Scott Warrender and writer-lyricist Jim Luigs do that, no problem. But instead…
For a moment in The Hollow, a toothsome Agatha Christie murder mystery now onstage at Theatre Three, it looks as if the butler did it. And what a butler. Played by the towering Chris Messersmith, this majordomo skulks around corners and looms like an ancient Lurch over his household of…
Just opened at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas is a play called Close Ties. The title is misleading, for the truth is, the connections among the members of the Frye family in Elizabeth Diggs’ two-act New England drama are terribly frayed. In CDT’s heart-tugging if sometimes too sentimental production, Bess and…
One thing about watching Hamlet, Shakespeare’s longest play: By the time the drama drags its boots into the fifth and final act, we groundlings are more than ready to see yon moody Dane die young. The sooner the better, too, because by the time this one ends, it feels as…
With a curtain time of 8:15 p.m., performances of Shakespeare Festival of Dallas’ current production of The Taming of the Shrew light up the outdoor Samuell-Grand Amphitheater just before the sun has dropped completely out of sight. Above the cool green lawn sloping up from the stage, purple streaks of…
The playbill profile of B.J. Cleveland, star of Over the River and Through the Woods and self-proclaimed “God of Local Theater and All It Entails,” offers a dedication: “For my grandparents, their parents and all the Milans–Je Mi Rodina!” Which is funny, because 1) the phrase translates into nothing (believe…
The Hip Pocket Theatre is out in the middle of nowhere at the end of a dirt road–kind of dodgy to city folk unsure about whether cows bite. But as your car scrapes along, the trees part and reveal a grassy clearing lit with strands of tiny lights and hemmed…
Everyone knows that old saying, “Behind every child performer there’s a flaming drag queen gesturing wildly for more spirited ‘spirit fingers’ and shrieking ‘sing out! SING OUT!!'” OK…so you’ve never heard that one before. We made it up. But if it were an old saying, Uptown Players’ production of Ruthless!…
There is one character in Ad Wars, Fran Wheatly, who’s a feminist grad student, fresh-faced and ready to get her career started in advertising. The play in no way revolves around our Fran, and most of her lines are intended solely for laughs, but you kind of pity her. All…
Lovers meet each other coming and going in The Last Five Years, a poignant and inventive two-person musical now onstage at Plano Repertory Theatre. Writer-composer Jason Robert Brown uses just 14 songs and 90 minutes of brief vignettes to dramatize the romance between ambitious New York writer Jamie Wellerstein (Ric…
In the parlance of Harlem circa 1943, an “old settler” was an unsettling term for a woman of a certain age who had no children, no husband and no prospects. With so many men in uniform overseas in those years, there weren’t a lot of single gents on the home…
“Adults are obsolete children,” said Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, the beloved author of dozens of books that taught children to read and parents to read faster. For generations, toddlers have cut their first molars gnawing corners of The Cat in the Hat and Hop on Pop. Seuss’…
Shortly after saying “I do,” Jane, the main character in Ground Zero Theater Company’s strange, sexy, wonderful new one-act play 10:10, decides she won’t after all. At her wedding reception, Jane locks eyes with Randy, the humpy half-brother of her shlumpy new husband, Gregger. In an impulsive move she will…
The plot thickens. In any decent stage play, that’s what usually occurs around the 20-minute point in Act 1. We get some conflict, some trouble. Stuff starts to happen between protagonist and antagonist. Blanche DuBois moves into the Kowalskis’ place, cramping Stanley’s style. Felix and Oscar have a tiff over…
Bat Boy just wants to be loved. Is that so wrong? In the creepy, funny, disturbing Bat Boy: The Musical, now playing at Theatre Three, a feral creature emerges from the depths of a West Virginia cave and tries to find his place in the world. With pointy incisors and…
On a stripped-down set of black metal scaffolding and simple black wooden cubes, Irving’s Lyric Stage company makes the audience see things that aren’t there. So inventive is director Drew Scott Harris’ staging of this fine new production of the musical Titanic, and so convincing are its 37 actors, that…
More than anything, Cyrano de Bergerac is terrified that his beautiful cousin, Roxane, will laugh at his nose. Cyrano is madly in love with Roxane, but his rocket schnozz makes him feel ugly. So, as the sad clown, he takes a defensive stance and pokes fun at his own most…
When all elements come together, a night at the theater can be as refreshing as a three-day weekend. In WaterTower Theatre’s production of the Rupert Holmes musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the cast is first-rate and the technical aspects are nearly flawless. Holmes’ book and music offer a cleverly…
Harold Pinter scares people. His plays can be obtuse, his characters off-putting and brittle. He likes to juggle time, tossing conversations around in a scene so that some characters occupy one plane of reality, while others exist somewhere else. He writes in choppy, stream-of-consciousness riffs. And then there are the…
As escapist entertainment, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes hits all the right notes. Within its two hours of slap-happiness are heard some of American musical theater’s wittiest, loveliest tunes: “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Friendship,” “You’re the Top,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “All Through the Night,” “Blow Gabriel Blow,” “Easy to…
Setting a play at a high school reunion is a risky choice. Most people dread reunions. Like weddings and funerals, those two other overused plot gimmicks, the real thing is bad enough. Why sit through one where you don’t even know the participants? In The Pavilion, now onstage in its…
Times being what they are, one line in Act 2 of the play Transatlantic Liaison is guaranteed to goose the audience to attention. “What a thankless people, the French,” growls Chicago author Nelson Algren to his paramour, French Existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir. On opening night at Theatre Three, where…
