In only 70 minutes, Barbette, the new play from Kitchen Dog Theater, achieves what too few other stage works ever do: It makes art. That it manages to make art happen so quietly and with so much heart is a special, precious gift to its audience. Based on the life…
Farewell, fourth wall. Actors are talking directly to their audiences in three shows, each of which tries to dissolve the invisible barrier between performer and spectator in a different way. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the in-your-face approach just gets annoying. Such is the case with Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days,…
Only a darned good writer could turn the subject of methamphetamine addiction into a spirited comedy romp. The Abandoned Reservoir, now onstage at the Bath House Cultural Center, is evidence that Stuart Litchfield was such a writer. It’s a shame he’s not around to hear the laughter and applause. Litchfield,…
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” wrote T.S. Eliot. For 1930s poet Laura Riding, that meant stealing not rhymes but husbands, notably Schuyler Jackson, a rather shiftless sometime writer for Time magazine who was married to a plain New England farm girl named Kit. Charismatic, ego-driven Riding was the companion…
The actresses playing conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton in the musical Side Show, now on view in a fine, emotionally charged production at Theatre Three, don’t use any special tricks to achieve the illusion of being attached at the hip. Their costumes aren’t even stitched together. Julie Stirman (Daisy)…
In those old mummy movies from the 1930s, nobody could outrun the corpse. The angry and very dead 3,000-year-old pharaoh in The Mummy and its dozens of sequels and remakes traveled with a step-drag, step-drag cadence that couldn’t outpace a three-legged sloth, but somehow the creature always caught up with…
Imitation being the sincerest form of show business, Neil Simon simply imitated one of his own successful formulas with California Suite, the comedy now getting a fine go-round at the Richardson Theatre Centre. The premise–one hotel room, four different stories–already had worked in Plaza Suite, the 1968 Broadway hit set…
Some plays are timely, some plays are timeless. Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild is one of the former. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is the latter. And in productions of each, currently onstage at Kitchen Dog Theater and Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District house, respectively, the reason why timeless works better is…
Quick, quote a famous line from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Don’t worry. Nobody can. Among the Bard’s works, this five-act tragedy is one of the least quotable, and it is performed less often even than Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens. Probably for good reason. This hasn’t stopped the Kitchen Dog Theater…
Big news: Big Daddy isn’t such a bigot after all. That’s one of several important revelations to be found in WaterTower Theatre’s breathtaking new production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where the emphasis shifts away from “Maggie the Cat” and onto the other feuding family members…
Back in 1982, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? played for only five performances at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre before it was shuttered as a critically panned flop. But that wasn’t the end of the show. Over the next 20 years, James Quinn and Alaric Jans’ lighthearted musical about…
Rock Baptist of Houston, setting for David Rambo’s trenchant comedy God’s Man in Texas now at Theatre Three, isn’t so much a place of worship as a stained-glassed theme park. Inside the fictional “largest Baptist church in the world” are restaurants, snack bars, a bowling alley and gym, dinner theater,…
Lie back and think of England. That’s the advice Victorian-era mothers used to whisper to just-married daughters for coping with their wifely duties in the bedroom. It’s also a good tip for anyone burdened with a ticket to The Countess, the new production at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre. This turgid…
Under the harsh glare of an overhead lamp, actress Amanda Denton leans forward over a small table, peers up at an unseen interrogator and asks, “Should I just speak? Is that OK? ‘Cause I got to sort of ease into it, you know?” With dull, stringy hair and eyes as…
For a musical without a real book, Blues in the Night, now at the Dallas Theater Center, tells a powerful story. Of broken romances and forbidden loves. Of late-night, gin-soaked laments for how things might have been. Most of all, of the power of a good woman, sadder but wiser…
For a few minutes toward the end of Cross Stage Right: Die! at the Pegasus Theatre, bumbling detective Harry Hunsacker stops bumbling. Under a hypnotic spell cast by his loyal and much smarter assistant, Nigel Grouse (played by Tim Honnoll), Harry suddenly begins to think he’s the reincarnation of Sherlock…
With the Winter Olympics schussing NBC’s must-watch sitcoms off the prime-time schedule, fans of Friends and Will & Grace might consider heading over to Kitchen Dog Theater for a fix. Rebound and Gagged, a new play by Aaron Ginsburg, sports all the elements of a successful TV situation comedy: attractive,…
The perfect antidote to the epidemic of bad acting and anemic material infecting Dallas stages this winter is Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. A wonderfully acted, bitingly witty paean to Willy the Shake and all things theatrical, the play also aims healthy doses of good-natured ribbing…
Remember when going to the theater felt like an escape from television? Great live theater once offered what so much prime-time TV did not: casts of fascinating characters saying magical, poetic, sometimes shocking lines of dialogue penned by bold young playwrights who wrangled with complex, provocative messages in their work…
Plays about the nobility of disease inevitably bathe the afflicted characters in halos as the most normal, well-adjusted, right-thinking people onstage. It’s everyone else around them who has the problems, imply the playwrights in such dramas. In their canon, a handicap clarifies values, gives the bearer a right to inflict…
Tricky thing, children’s theater. It must capture the attention of little ‘uns whose attention spans are damaged by hours of Gameboys and Power Puff Girls and at the same time entertain grown-ups reluctant to turn off their cell phones for the sake of a cultural outing with the kiddos. African…
Call me conventional, call me coarse, call me crazy, but I prefer my drama, oh, I don’t know, dramatic. Give me a plot with a narrative structure that makes me eager to discover what happens next. Give me characters that are as clever as they are round, who search for…
