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Elaine Liner

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Hang on, Snoopy

Good grief! Happiness is Charlie Brown at Theatre Three; Patsy Cline and Magi are magical, too.

By Elaine Liner
Dec 16, 2004

Can Snoopy be due for a comeback? Back in the 1960s and '70s, the black and white beagle and his pie-faced little pals from Charles M. Schulz's cartoon strip Peanuts reigned as beloved pop-culture icons, up there with rock stars and astronauts. Even during the flower power years, more than...
Fright Before Christmas

Oh, drear, Dallas Theater Center's annual Carol serves up a Dickens of a downer

By Elaine Liner
Dec 2, 2004

Zombies do not deliver Christmas cheer. A small squad of the eerie undead stomp onstage to represent the Spirits of Christmases Yet to Come in Act 2 of Dallas Theater Center's A Christmas Carol. They step-drag, step-drag in front of Ebenezer Scrooge (James Carpenter). Rising from the misty graveyard in...
Chasing His Tale

Kitchen Dog measures Circumference of a Squirrel; Labyrinth's Wonderful Life wanders

By Elaine Liner
Nov 25, 2004

There are only so many Cratchits and Nutcrackers and flock-watching shepherds a person can stomach this time of year. It's nice to see theaters offering alternatives to the traditional tinsel-dripping holiday hooha. Opening over the next couple of weeks: Theatre Britain's lighthearted "panto" version of Snow White at Trinity River...
Porn Yesterday

Naked ambitions on display at Teatro Dallas; Second Thought adopts troubled Orphans

By Elaine Liner
Nov 18, 2004

They're packing 'em in over at Teatro Dallas for the touring production of Making Porn, a lurid little comedy about the gay porn industry that stars one of its bigger, um, talents. That would be Matthew Rush, a puffy-lipped he-man with arms that hang like chuck roasts from his massive...
Acting on Assumptions

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead asks a lot, maybe too much, of its audience

By Elaine Liner
Nov 4, 2004

Tom Stoppard is a tough sell to the typical theatergoer. And by typical I mean a real die-hard fan of live performance who pays to see several plays a year. Most people don't go to the theater. Ever. Just like most people don't eat fried calf brains or read Doris...
Wilde Party

Oscar goes to DTC for classic British comedy in The Importance of Being Earnest

By Elaine Liner
Oct 28, 2004

The story goes that when Oscar Wilde traveled to America in 1881, he was asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare. "Only my genius," he replied. The Irish-born poet, novelist and playwright was the Victorian era's most quotable aesthete, famously spouting barbed aphorisms even to his...
Dungeons and Drag Queens

CTD revives sweet, raunchy Rocky Horror; Arthur's in the dark in PRT's Camelot

By Elaine Liner
Oct 21, 2004

Let's do the time warp again and again and again. The Rocky Horror Show returns, this time at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, where the rip-roaring, raunchy fun starts well before the first glimpse of that "sweet transsexual," Dr. Frank 'N' Furter (played by Paul Taylor as a cross-dressing cross between...
Blues States

Singing it loud and proud at WaterTower; Echo trio tries red-hot political comedy

By Elaine Liner
Oct 14, 2004

What is it about the blues that makes feeling bad feel so good? Two new productions are singing the blues in different ways--one musically, one satirically--but there's something immensely satisfying for the theatergoer in both. It Ain't Nothin' But the Blues, the nostalgic revue that just opened the new season...
Party Favors

It's easy to get jazzed about The Wild Party; a bumpy ride on KDT's "A" Train

By Elaine Liner
Oct 7, 2004

Now this is a party. Uptown Players close out their third season with an orgy of writhing bods and steamy hook-ups in a production of Andrew Lippa's Jazz Age musical The Wild Party. It has it all in terms of R-rated box-office appeal: nudity, boy-boy kissing (what would this theater...
We, the Jury

With To Kill a Mockingbird, Dallas Children's Theater stages a trial with few errors

By Elaine Liner
Sep 30, 2004

We need Atticus Finch. Dedicated, decent, a scholar and father, Finch is the main adult character in Harper Lee's perfect 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. He's a good man, this lawyer Finch, thoughtful, fair, loving and just. Whether from our adolescent acquaintance with him from a high school reading...
Grain Man

A simple farmer teaches lessons of patience and wisdom in PRT's The Drawer Boy

By Elaine Liner
Sep 23, 2004

Angus can't remember anything for five minutes. Or three minutes. Or two. He has a steel plate in his head from a war injury. His short-term memory is shot. He can count the stars in the night sky in one glance and add columns of numbers in a trice, but...
Smokin'

DTC kicks it up a notch with Anna in the Tropics; area critics honor the year's best stage work

By Elaine Liner
Sep 16, 2004

Smoke and poetry thicken the air in Anna in the Tropics, now onstage in an intensely passionate production at Dallas Theater Center. Set in a cigar factory outside Tampa in 1929, Nilo Cruz's two-act play, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer for best new drama, unfolds like a hazy, sexy dream...
Something to Sneeze At

Theatre Three blows a big one with Tale of the Allergist's Wife; RTC rolls on Secrets

By Elaine Liner
Sep 9, 2004

As midlife crises go, Marjorie Taub's is a monster. In agony over the death of her therapist, Marjorie, the main character in Charles Busch's comedy The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, is first seen by the audience at Theatre Three deep in menopausal malaise, wailing and whimpering like a wounded...
The Big Tease

CTD's Steel Magnolias should curl up and dye; Uptown Players go for the full monty

By Elaine Liner
Aug 26, 2004

Flapping and honking like geese in a yard, the six female characters in Steel Magnolias are exaggerated versions of pushy Southern women as seen through the eyes of a gay man, playwright Robert Harling. For Love! Valour! Compassion!, gay playwright Terrence McNally gathers eight stereotypes of artsy, East Coast-y homosexual...
Leaves of Crass

Little Shop of schnorrers; The Exit finds three characters stuck in motel hell

By Elaine Liner
Aug 19, 2004

Skid Row never looked so clean. Every ugly, filthy, creepy, scary detail of the original film it was based on has been scrubbed away in the oversized touring production of Little Shop of Horrors now going through its motions at the Music Hall at Fair Park. This version of the...
No People Like Show People

Anton in Show Business: Everything about it is appealing in a new theater company's debut at DTC

By Elaine Liner
Aug 12, 2004

"The American theater's in a shitload of trouble," the "stage manager" says to the audience in Anton in Show Business, Jane Martin's roundhouse punch at the absurdity of the acting profession. That may be true, but the funny thing is, by choosing this dark, smart satire as its season opener,...
Porn to Be Mild

No sex, please, they're skittish at The MAC; comedy galore, mystery a bore in Addison

By Elaine Liner
Aug 5, 2004

You'll come for the title. You'll stay for 70 minutes. And you'll go home thinking of punch lines infinitely funnier than the ones coming from the stage in Porn for Puritans, the comedy revue now playing in the little theater at The MAC. Written and performed by Leigh Tomlinson and...
They Got Served

Laughs top the menu in CTD's The Dining Room; feast on the voices of Lee and Floyd at the Hideaway

By Elaine Liner
Jul 1, 2004

Sometimes a few orders of well-made appetizers can be as satisfying as a four-course meal. So it is with The Dining Room, now playing at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas. A.R. Gurney's two-act play offers nibbles of story, several tasty characters and enough good lines to chew on to forgive the...
Long Time No See

Wait Until Dark pits a blind girl against three violent cons; Yankee goes south at DSM

By Elaine Liner
Jun 24, 2004

The first words the audience hears in the Richardson Theatre Centre production of the thriller Wait Until Dark come from President Gerald R. Ford, grimly granting Richard M. Nixon a full pardon for involvement in Watergate crimes. It's a brief audio flashback to 1974, a dark period in American history,...
Hearts and Letters

Theatre Britain's The Day After the Fair: love's masquerade on page and stage

By Elaine Liner
Jun 17, 2004

Hardly anyone writes love letters anymore. Sigh. Real billets-doux, the kind penned in inky swirls on creamy paper, have given way to the crude shorthand of instant messages and the tinny squawk of disembodied voicemail. Try wrapping a satin ribbon around those. Back in the dark ages, B.AOL., as it...
Museum Quality

Permanent Collection paints the art world black and white at Kitchen Dog Theater

By Elaine Liner
Jun 10, 2004

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...
Song of the Soused

Tipsy Company arrives at WTT; more hooch might help Violet at Plano Rep

By Elaine Liner
Jun 3, 2004

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...