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…
The laughs are all there in black and white in It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder!, Pegagus Theatre’s stylish, fast-paced chiaroscuro comedy written by and starring Kurt Kleinmann. Twelfth in a series of satirical mysteries featuring lovably bumbling detective Harry Hunsacker (played by Kleinmann), this one gets a…
‘Tis the season to roll out the proverbial cash cows of Christmas–those obligatory feel-good productions, given a tragic twist perhaps or a comic shakedown, but ultimately setting their sights on invigorating the spirit and enriching the box office. After all, what would the holidays be without three different theatrical versions…
Don’t be scared by the title. Christmas at Ground Zero, a new collection of miniplays onstage at the Bath House Cultural Center through December 22, isn’t some hurried-up, played-to-order commentary on the national nightmare that started in September. Only one of the works in this sometimes touching, sometimes trivial production…
Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin offended French readers in the 19th century. Considered scandalous, even pornographic, it told of a repressed young woman who kills her husband to marry a rogue painter. The author’s tale has inspired New York-born composer Tobias Picker to create a more likable Thérèse for a…
Even the most hardened of humbuggers among us has trouble grumbling at full-Grinch when confronted each holiday TV season with the holy trinity of Christmas fables. By these, I mean It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and Scrooge as well as their dramatic permutations and progeny. (No way…
Nick Cristano has a problem, and I’m having trouble figuring out why. As the central character in Theatre Three’s box office hit, Over the River and Through the Woods, Nick is put to a choice. Should he take the promotion his advertising company is offering him and move to Seattle?…
It’s hard to cop to this, but here goes: As the lights rise over the masterfully crafted set of The Front Page at the Dallas Theater Center, I am already prejudiced against the production. That’s right, prejudiced against this classic of the American theater. Artistic director Richard Hamburger has chosen…
It’s 1999, the end of history as we know it, with the Cold War over and the Western World infatuated with its own narcissistic reflection as it gazes into its navel and can’t see past itself. Forget the big picture. There are no more big ideas. There’s no more big…
There are two fundamental rules that must remain inviolate for my 4-year-old, Max, to enjoy children’s theater. First, never allow larger-than-life animal characters to frolic in any interactive fashion with the audience: Breaking the fourth wall scares the hell out of him. And second, make certain that the running time…
One of the great issues of modern drama can best be phrased as a simple, catty question: “Why is Hedda such a bitch?” Certainly, the pioneering dramatist Henrik Ibsen was spry enough with language, structure and the subtle insertions of social conscience in Hedda Gabler to give theatergoers a thousand…
“The people’s musical returns!” trumpets a poster advertising the appearance of Blood Brothers in an English theater. It’s kind of amusing that a show written by blue-collar advocate Willy Russell as relief from the budget-busting spectacles of Andrew Lloyd Webber would wind up competing with Webber in both ticket prices…
The hugely influential 19th-century art critic John Ruskin is said to have influenced the success of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and to have earned the undying fandom of no less than Gandhi and Tolstoy. But the poor bastard is nowadays more discussed in art history classes for…
Critics reach a point in their careers when they need to be careful about heedlessly tossing out adjectives to praise a show. If we’re not paying attention, we go on autopilot and use a word such as “breathtaking” to commend a staging that floored us with its passion and quality,…
When a show has been advertised with the line “Dreams Don’t Always Come True,” you know entering the theater that you’re likely not in for a giddy romp. And yet the ultimate word-of-mouth musical Floyd Collins, given a North Texas premiere by Plano Repertory Theatre, isn’t as relentlessly downbeat as…
