The 12th annual Out of the Loop Fringe Festival continues at WaterTower Theatre in Addison for one more weekend. Eighteen shows, most under an hour, are on this year’s schedule, which covers three acting spaces. (The Observer is a sponsor.) If you’re there, don’t miss The Ugly One, directed by…

You’ll have to take the afternoon off, and you should, to see the splendid new production of Greater Tuna at the Bath House Cultural Center. One Thirty Productions performs only at 1:30 p.m., and the company has found success with their matinee-only format. The house was packed for the opening…

For the impatient theatergoer, festivals such as WaterTower Theatre’s Out of the Loop Fringe are a good fit. Lots of short, provocative pieces. (Most performances come in under an hour.) A mix of dance, music, drama and comedy. Plenty of breaks to mingle with patrons and artists. Now in its…

By now it’s clear that Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty wishes he could fly. This season he has two shows back-to-back with “Fly” in the title: Fly by Night, set during the 1965 New York City blackout, opens at April 26 at Kalita Humphreys Theater; and Fly, opening…

There are child actors and there are real actors who happen to be children. At Fun House Theatre in Plano, a company we’ve praised before, 18 serious actors, ages 10 to 17, are doing an impressive production of Hamlet right now. The lead is played by Shepton High School ninth-grader…

There are great gay playwrights like Tennessee Williams whose plays have become classics because they deserved to be. There are good gay playwrights like Terrence McNally whose work is perceived as great because it’s just a little better than a lot of other stuff out there. And there is Del…

Actor Kieran Connolly sits in full view for 20 minutes before the first word of Red, the two-man bio-drama about artist Mark Rothko now running at the Wyly Theatre. As patrons take their seats, Connolly leans back in a chair, silently, intently staring at a huge red and black painting,…

What’s it all about, Aphra? Echo Theatre continues its season of plays by 17th century wit Aphra Behn with the Restoration farce The Lucky Chance, or The Alderman’s Bargain, directed by René Moreno, running one more weekend at the Bath House Cultural Center. Behn (rhymes with “rain”) is regarded as…

Some shows never change. Like Wicked, A Chorus Line, Chicago. Some do, however, and two that have changed for the better are big comedies with music on Dallas stages for one more weekend. The splashy Broadway tour of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes is at the Winspear. Set on a transatlantic…

If you missed On the Eve, the thrilling new rock musical by Dallas’ own Michael Federico (book) and Seth and Shawn Magill of the band Home by Hovercraft (music), during its sold-out run at the Magnolia Lounge last fall, you’ll get your chance to see it on a bigger stage…

Kitchen Dog Theater’s production of Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs is perfectly absurd. Also absurdly perfect. Change hats. It takes a few minutes, 15 or 20, to get into the rhythm of the thing. At first it’s slow, but for good reasons. The pace gradually picks up, like the assembly line…

Sometimes it’s worth it to wait and catch a show at the end of its run rather than on opening night. By the third or fourth week, actors have it down. No stumbling over dialogue. No loss of focus. So it is with the ferociously good production at Theatre Three…

Good actors are doing their level best with a not-so-good play and a sub-standard production at African American Repertory Theatre in DeSoto. The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years — whew — is a dull period comedy that deals…

Dallas actor and playwright Danny O’Connor first performed his one-man show Zero at WaterTower Theatre’s black box studio five and a half years ago. Since then, he’s lost 60 pounds and he and his show have gained some comedy muscle. Now he’s a taller, younger, leaner version of Louis C.K…

Actor Brian McEleney is the luckiest person in the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre during Dallas Theater Center’s production of King Lear. He’s the only one in the hall who doesn’t have to watch his performance in the title role. For this co-production with Rhode Island’s Trinity Repertory Company, DTC…

Putting It Together, a two-hour revue of Stephen Sondheim songs, isn’t much of a musical. It’s more of a meh-sical. But WaterTower Theatre in Addison has a reasonably pleasant staging of it directed by Terry Martin. Singer-actors Alex Organ, Bob Hess, John Campione, Diana Sheehan and newcomer Sarah Elizabeth Smith…

Matthew Posey writes, directs and stars in all of the weird, wonderful musical dramedies he puts on at his Ochre House theater, and he always shows the audience something unexpected. He plays the banjo in Old: a Vaudeville Tragedy in Two Acts, currently running at the tiny space near Fair…

Do I hear a waltz? And a Charleston? And some numbers from Ghost: The Musical? The theater year gets off to an upbeat start with talented actors singing their faces off in a trio of musicals, large and small, stretching from Fair Park to Turtle Creek to Addison. The biggie…

Couple things. Christopher Walken’s got nothing on Van Quattro. More about that in a sec. If you have avoided live theater lately because you think it’s boring and the plays are too long, Second Thought Theatre’s season-opening production of Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane will change your mind. Get…

Dallas Theater Center now has a full-time playwright-in-residence. He is Will Power, recipient of a fat grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is spending $3.7 million to support new playwrights-in-residence programs at 14 regional theaters across the country. As DTC’s in-house playwright and a member of its artistic…

Seeing Pegasus Theatre’s one-and-only annual production of a “black-and-white play” is as much a New Year’s ritual for some of us as eating a good-luck bowl of black-eyed peas. Lucky then for theatergoers who both have and have not seen a Pegasus comedy, this year’s show is a delicious revival…