Quick, while temps have dipped slightly below heatstroke levels, make plans to catch Shakespeare Dallas’ Twelfth Night at Samuell-Grand Amphitheater. You can take a picnic or sack of snacks with you. Flop onto your blanket or low lawn chair and soak up some culture as the sun sets over cottonwood…
Playwright and SMU grad Beth Henley won a Pulitzer for her 1981 Southern gothic comedy Crimes of the Heart. Interesting to note that the 1981 Pulitzer for fiction went to John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. It was a good year for literature about idiots in Dixie. Crimes, now…
They’re identical twins! Who don’t know each other! Comedy! Second Thought Theatre winds up its eighth season with The Bomb-itty of Errors, a hip-hop take on Shakespeare. Written by Jordan Allen-Dutton, Jason Catalano, GQ and Erik Weiner, with music by Heath Gage and Steven Michael Walters, the show, according to…
Among things you can see in Dallas Theater Center’s production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Wyly Theatre: Old Testament characters playing basketball and plugged into iPods; a giant wooden pyramid that breaks apart like a cool toy from a museum…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. In the third-semester acting class he teaches at KD Studio, theater director René Moreno recently asked students…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Mark Graham. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. There is a moment in the sexy Adam Rapp play Red Light Winter that could test the…
Leave it to director René Moreno (profiled in this week’s “People” issue) to find a way to make Coriolanus hot. For Shakespeare Dallas’ first production of this rarely done bit of Bard, Moreno cast the easy-on-the-eyes (and ears) actor Alex Organ in the title role. He plays Shakespeare’s lonely warrior,…
The audience-goes-crazy moments are cleverly written into the book of Jersey Boys, the long-running hit Broadway musical on view at the Winspear for three more weekends. Frankie Valli and his three pals, known as The Four Seasons, start out singing on street corners in New Jersey and work their way…
A flood of flawed heroes! An abundance of bounders and bastards! A cavalcade of troubled characters has arrived on summer’s stages. First up, because he’s heavily armed and insists upon’t, is Coriolanus. William Shakespeare’s lonely Roman warrior is a fierce 5th century B.C. battlebot with nothing but contempt for common…
Kent, you lost me at “and four.” Do you think you can dance? Do want to “co-star” in Dallas Theater Center’s just-opened production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Wyly Theatre? DTC posted a challenge this week on its Facebook page. Joseph director/choreographer Joel Ferrell is offering…
There aren’t that many young dancers anymore who cite the elegant 1930s Broadway and movie stars the Nicholas Brothers as inspirations. Or who even know who one-legged tap dancer Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates was. But Keira Leverton and Courtne Shed, the Dallas tap dancing duo known as the Rhythmic Souls,…
Dallas actor Cameron Cobb played Hamlet in 100-degree heat in Samuell-Grand Park last summer for Shakespeare Dallas. He portrayed numerous roles, male and female, in Kitchen Dog’s excellent two-hander The Turn of the Screw this spring. Now it’s his manifest destiny to occupy the title role in Theatre Three’s rude…
Nobody does big American musicals like Lyric Stage, the Irving theater company that does only musicals and only in the biggest way possible. Their season-ender, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 70-year-old classic Oklahoma!, brings the show back to where it started, with all the usually omitted songs back in place, 30 singers…
The singing, dancing cowboys in Lyric Stage’s Oklahoma! compete for your attention this week with the singing, dancing seventh president in Theatre Three’s Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson. With Jersey Boys and its singing, almost-dancing quartet of lovable mooks back in town for a month-long run at the Winspear, there may…
“It’s my responsibility to pass on what I know,” says Tony-winning singer and actress Betty Buckley. The Fort Worth native pays it forward artistically with her series of Song Interpretation and Monologue Master Classes, focusing on storytelling through song. Taught by Buckley at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth…
Welcome back, Ewings. Where y’all been? Only in television limbo, it turns out, because everything that ever was on TV eventually is reborn. (Out of desperation, apparently. What else explains the soon-to-return Munsters?) Dallas is back as a “new” series tonight at 8 p.m., with a two-hour premiere on cable’s…
Summer is the season for light comedy at the theater and Boeing-Boeing, the farce now running at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, will have your giggle muscles going boing-boing for two solid hours of funny. It’s a 1960s play, resuscitated successfully on Broadway three years ago, about one playboy (played here by…
Shut the front door. And the kitchen door. And the bathroom and bedroom doors. If it’s a farce, and WaterTower Theatre’s Boeing-Boeing is a classic one, count on doors swinging open and slamming shut with split-second precision. The six characters in this 1962 Marc Camoletti sex comedy burn oodles of…
ATTPAC invites you to dress as your favorite Broadway character for the Tony Award-watching party Sunday, June 10, at the Winspear Opera House. So how easy is it to throw on a rumpled suit, carry an old suitcase and call yourself Willy Loman? (The Broadway revival of Death of a…
Like fellow Oklahoman Tracy Letts (of August: Osage County fame), playwright Vicki Caroline Cheatwood has a good ear for how people in that state talk to each other. Plain-spoken, yes, but with a certain poetry to the flow of everyday speech. She’s lived in Dallas for many years, but Cheatwood…
Where are the great new American plays coming from? Not just from East Coast graduate programs that follow the Paula (How I Learned to Drive) Vogel model, no matter how many of those dreary dramas Dallas Theater Center tries to force upon us. Not from the ranks of hot TV…
There isn’t a “splatter zone” for Dallas Theater Center’s production of the play God of Carnage, but maybe there should be. A massive, catastrophic bout of vomiting by a character happens early on, a wave of chunky barf that splashes over the scenery furniture and across the floor of the…
