Magician Harry Anderson Has Something Up His Sleeve

“There is no magic. There are only magicians,” said Harry Anderson, veteran magician and former sitcom star. He was onstage in a ballroom full of amateur and professional conjurers at the 2013 convention of the Texas Association of Magicians, held Labor Day weekend at Addison’s Intercontinental Hotel. More than 500…

DTC’s Peter Pan Musical Fly Has a Serious Wendy Complex

We all grow older, but until we die we’ll be shadowed by the boy who never grows up, Peter Pan. The rotten little imp is everywhere. Always has been, always will be. As inescapable as Santa Claus and Mickey Mouse. Instead of new ideas, big-time musical theater keeps reaching back…

Monster Hit

It doesn’t suck to be the cast of Avenue Q at Theatre Too in The Quadrangle. A year after opening the first local production of the Tony-winning puppet-centric musical, the same seven Dallas actors still have their hands up the backsides of the fuzzy felt-mericans. Their performances, brighter and funnier…

Flashdance the Musical Is the Best Dallas Summer Musical of the Year

According to the creators of the Broadway-bound (eventually) stage musical, what the 95-minute 1983 movie version of Flashdance lacked was 16 more musical numbers — on top of the soundtrack’s period cheese-rock “Maniac,” “Gloria,” “Manhunt” and “What a Feeling” — and another hour or so of dialogue and dancing. They’re…

Theatre Britain Returns with Tea-time Musical Albert’s Anthology

Theatre Britain is back at the Cox Playhouse in Plano with the charming Albert’s Anthology, a comedy-with-music directed by Sue Birch that’s as sweet as the jam on a homemade scone. Jackie Mellor-Guin’s 75-minute script finds 100-year-old British grandpa Albert (nicely played by Frisco Community Theatre producer Howard Korn) celebrating…

Blunders Bedevil Theatre Three’s Musical City of Angels

Bosley Crowther, grandfather of critical snark, once described the 1946 film noir The Big Sleep as “one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused.” Ditto the too-clever-for-its-own-good 1989 musical noir send-up City of Angels,…

Love’s No Accident In Gruesome Playground Injuries

The lifelong connection between the two characters in Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries begins when they are 8, meeting in the school infirmary. Kayleen has tummy troubles. Dougie has just ridden his bike off the roof, splitting his forehead. Thirty years and many accidents and illnesses later, the pair finally…

Trouble in River City in Lyric Stage’s Vanilla Music Man

Meredith Willson’s 1957 musical The Music Man, now at Irving’s Lyric Stage, feels as summery as an ice cream social. If only this production came in more flavors than vanilla. The quaint ode to small-town life circa 1912 falls flat if its angelic Iowans aren’t threatened with perdition by a…

Start laughing now at Dinosaur and Robot Stop a Train at FIT

The audience just would not leave. Rhythmic Souls, a Dallas tap-dancing troupe, had already taken their bows after a 40-minute performance called Play It by Ear, one of four shows premiering the second weekend of the four-week Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center. But the crowd…

FIT’s in Good Shape with Two Strong Shows (for a Start)

The first weekend of the 15th annual Festival of Independent Theatres, which gives small companies one-hour slots to try out new work at the Bath House Cultural Center, yielded two strong new pieces by Dallas writers: Like Me by gay monologist John Michael Colgin (directed by Donny Covington); and Lydie…