Dull jobs in dreary surroundings have inspired many a wonderful play: David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, set in a rundown sales office; Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan’s Mister Roberts, about bored sailors on a WWII supply ship; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the granddaddy of all dramas about soul-sucking…

Kitchen Dog Theater’s New Works Festival started Friday at The MAC and runs through June 22. Here’s the lineup: Se Llama Cristina by Octavio Solis is the mainstage feature of this annual festival of new plays and script readings. A couple (Israel Lopez, Vanessa DeSilvio) wake up after a heroin…

High camp: Mae West in a feather boa in She Done Him Wrong. Low camp: Jamie Farr in a dowdy dress on M*A*S*H. Camp adjacent: Every cock in a frock in the mock campy Priscilla Queen of the Desert the Musical, whose national tour is now at the Dallas Summer…

Whole lotta twerking going on in Fela!, the Broadway musical whose national tour is now steaming up the Winspear Opera House. The dancing in this show is hotness on a whole other scale from other Broadway hits. Bill T. Jones’ nonstop choreography fills Fela! with an athletic eroticism centered roundly…

Count on Dallas Children’s Theater to do more than just mail it in with The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley, based on the popular kids’ book by Jeff Brown. The musical adaptation, directed and choreographed by Michael Serrecchia (with an assist from Megan Kelly Bates), makes a slick, three-dimensional, 75-minute…

Why does it always feel like a fluke when Theatre Three does something as polished and well-acted as Enron? The play by Lucy Prebble is running now at the theater-in-the-round at The Quadrangle in a spiffy production directed and designed by Jeffrey Schmidt. Like last year’s staging of Aaron Sorkin’s…

The Fates may finally have sprinkled stardust on Dallas Theater Center’s artistic director, Kevin Moriarty. For years he’s been trying to launch a new musical here, with the hope of turning it into a Broadway success. Giant didn’t do it. Neither did Lysistrata Jones. But his latest attempt, the dreamy…

New Mexico is where you’ll find the six characters in search of an exit line in Angels Fall, a dreary play Lanford Wilson was always sorry he’d written. (It was a commission project he churned out and hated, or so he said in The New York Times.) Contemporary Theatre of…

If only college life were ever as naive and boisterous as it was in the 1939 musical Too Many Girls, now getting a sis-boom-beautiful revival at Irving’s Lyric Stage. Out at New Mexico’s fictional Pottawotamie U, the football team has started winning, thanks to four Ivy League transfers who know…

Ah, now we know what was missing from all of Uptown Players’ previous men-in-drag comedies by Las Vegas playwright Jamie Morris: Jamie Morris wasn’t in them. He’s in his latest — Re-Designing Women, now in its world premiere at the Rose Room on Cedar Springs — and he’s terrific. In…

“I like criticism, but it must be my way,” said Mark Twain. That also goes for the actor Val Kilmer, currently portraying Twain at the Wyly Theatre (through April 22) in a one-man touring production he wrote and directed. To be granted tickets to last night’s performance of Citizen Twain,…

By now, every media slob in Dallas has interviewed Val Kilmer. The 53-year-old actor’s been in town for a couple of weeks, rehearsing his one-man Citizen Twain show, playing April 18 through 21 at the Wyly Theatre. He wrote the one-act performance after a decade of research for a movie…

The Joads do finally make it to California in The Grapes of Wrath. Though not without a great many problems. Now onstage at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, Frank Galati’s inelegant stage adaptation of the magnificent Steinbeck novel is directed by WaterTower artistic director Terry Martin. He’s put some seriously talented local…

If only we could tithe to the muse who inspires the strange and wonderful plays Matthew Posey thinks up and puts on at his Ochre House theater. His latest, written and directed by Posey, starring Justin Locklear, Elizabeth Evans and Posey, is Dreams of Slaughtered Sheep, a two-act comic meditation…

Nobody’s doing children’s theater around here the way Jeff Swearingen, Bren Rapp and the kids of Fun House Theatre and Film in Plano are doing it. We liked their all-youth Man of La Mancha and were impressed by their all-kid Hamlet. Now they’re taking on a darker American classic, but…

Solo comedy actor John Michael Colgin is only 23 and still finding his way as an out-gay writer and performer of his own material. His latest is the enjoyable but uneven John Michael and the Order of the Penix, his third show at the small experimental company Nouveau 47 at…

Programs handed out at performances of Rx at Kitchen Dog Theater should list possible side effects of seeing the new Kate Fodor play: sudden bursts of laughter, slapped knees, tickled ribs, split sides. And if you relate to the predicaments of the characters, perhaps some major waves of empathy. Such…

Oscar Madison, hot slob? OK, let’s go with that. In Dallas Theater Center’s production of Neil Simon’s ever-delightful comedy The Odd Couple, director Kevin Moriarty has cast handsome New York actor J. Anthony Crane as the messy one. Smart twist. We go in expecting a Walter Matthau or a Jack…

The best things that can happen to a playwright happened to Dallas writer D. L. Coburn in the 1970s. Then in his mid-30s and working in advertising, Coburn wrote his first play, The Gin Game, a two-act two-hander about a man named Weller and a woman named Fonsia. In their…

Look beyond the politics espoused in the fact-based one-woman drama My Name Is Rachel Corrie, currently onstage at Second Thought Theatre at Bryant Hall. They’re dicey and have drawn controversy since the play debuted in London in 2005. Rachel Corrie, raised in a comfortable home in the Pacific Northwest, dropped…