Twelve-year-old actress Kennedy Waterman, the late Jerry Russell and lots and lots of Shakespeare are on this year’s list of honorees chosen by the 12 members of the DFW Theater Critics Forum. The annual luncheon and voting session was held Saturday, September 7. Maybe it was the heat, maybe we’ve…

Jerry Russell, founder of Fort Worth’s Stage West theater and father of state Senator Wendy Davis, has died. The sad news came from Davis, who released this statement Thursday morning: “I am heartbroken to report that my father, Jerry Russell, passed away peacefully in the early hours of this morning…

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…

Be afraid of Virginia Woolf. She’s drunk off her ass. In Edward Albee’s epic 1962 drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, main characters George and Martha pour 17 drinks — hard liquor on the rocks — in the first act alone. Nine or 10 more in the second act. Another…

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…

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 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…

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,…

With songs in their hearts, Dallas theaters are making this a summer of melodic storytelling. There’s a new musical or three tuning up every week. A trio of tough-to-stage pieces of musical theater just opened at Uptown Players, Theatre Three and Theatre Britain, with varying degrees of success. In 85…

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…

Traces lets you marvel at the wonders of the human body while making you feel bad about your own. Seven gorgeous young performers in a 90-minute whirl of acrobatics, dance and borderline insanity fly off the floor and hang in mid-air longer than logic and the laws of gravity say…

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…

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…

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…

All the world’s a stage, Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It. It makes sense, then, to see some plays outside of conventional theaters once in a while. Like under tall trees in a parking lot next to an alley in Uptown. Or inside a converted Art Deco bath house…

Kitchen Dog Theater opens its 15th annual New Works Festival with Octavio Solis’ absurd one-act Se Llama Cristina. It begins as a fuzzy encounter between a couple, played by Dallas stage newcomers Vanessa DeSilvio and Israel Lopez, wacked out on heroin and waking up a little hazy about who they…

If you’re a fan of Glengarry Glen Ross and you missed the fantastically funny Daffodil Girls at Plano’s Fun House Theatre and Film last month, it’s back for a weekend reprise, June 5 through 8 in the Plano Children’s Theatre space. Written and directed by Fun House founder and kiddie…