George Hamilton is in town. You can tell the actor is somewhere near the Fair Park area by the faint orangey glow emanating from the stage at the Music Hall, where Hamilton is appearing in the touring production of the musical La Cage aux Folles. He plays a gay cabaret…
The wild and wonderful Westons of Oklahoma are back. Think your family’s crazy? This bunch thrives on hard liquor and invective. As the subjects of Tracy Letts’ much-honored play August: Osage County, the Westons are the most pill-addled, booze-soaked, internecine American family to tear up a stage since the Tyrones…
Actors Jenny Ledel and Cameron Cobb have experience with ghosts. In last summer’s Hamlet at Shakespeare Dallas, they played Ophelia and the moody Dane in an especially dark take on the Bard’s dance with death. Now in Kitchen Dog Theater’s production of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, they…
Nouveau 47 Theatre at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park is building a reputation as a developer of interesting new plays. Their new works festival is coming up soon and they like to foster relationships with young writers and performers pouring heart, soul and fresh ideas onto the stage. Their…
A creepy mansion crawling with unhappy ghosts is the setting of Henry James’ spooky 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, now playing at Kitchen Dog Theater in a spiffy, stripped-down stage adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher. Jenny Ledel lets hysteria build slowly in her portrayal of a newly hired governess…
The ladies around the tables in actress Lulu Ward’s converted garage in Garland were talking serious politics as they pieced together pretty scraps of fabric Sunday afternoon. Shiny bits of pink satin, bright fuchsia felt and black and white zebra print were being sewn into puffy three-dimensional shapes that look…
On Monday night, April 2, WaterTower Theatre opens the first local production of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer- and Tony-winning masterpiece, August: Osage County. The sprawling drama has been compared with O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Imagine O’Neill’s troubled Tyrone family turned into the wacked-out Westons of Oklahoma. The WaterTower show,…
They’ll make you wear a nametag at Bryant Hall, set up like a hotel conference room for Second Thought Theatre’s mixed-media production of Dallas playwright Eric Steele’s The Midwest Trilogy. There’s free coffee in Styrofoam cups and cheap cookies, fuel for an 80-minute production that includes two short films and…
Dallas Theater Center and the Lexus Broadway Series at the Winspear have announced their 2012-’13 seasons. Big doin’s at two big venues for plays and musicals. Get ready for new takes on Peter Pan and Dracula, a puppet horse, some wrasslin’ and dancin’ and singin’. And Shakespeare. Always Shakespeare. DTC’s…
All rise for Superior Donuts. Tracy Letts’ funny little play about lonely people has brought light and laughter (and the scent of coffee and tasty pastries) to Theatre Too, the 80-seat space below Theatre Three. They’ve created a fully functioning South Side Chicago doughnut shop down there, run by a…
Let’s talk about 50 Shades of Grey. Everyone else is. And by “everyone,” I mean middle-aged ladies getting re-blonded in the nicer salons of Manhattan’s Upper East Side (according to a friend who tweeted me about overheard conversations there), girlfriend book clubs on the Right and Left Coasts (and some…
Students at Woodrow Wilson High School in East Dallas performed the musical Les Misérables in 2005. On Wednesday afternoon, the creators of that long-running Broadway hit, lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, borrowed the Woodrow stage for a couple of hours to rehearse their enormous concert Do You Hear…
Uptown Players, take a bow. Ten years ago this gay-focused theater company, started by executive producers Craig Lynch and Jeff Rane, put on little shows with little money in a tiny hole of a space off Stemmons Freeway. Now they occupy the 400-seat, city-owned, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Kalita Humphreys Theater…
A day of art, music and food called Go West Fest is a new event set for Saturday, April 7. Theater company Upstart Productions is steering the bash, which will happen in a converted warehouse space at 425 Bedford Street, just south of Singleton Boulevard in the La Bajada neighborhood…
Those who were in the audience that night in October 2005 remember it well. The national tour of Wicked had hit the Music Hall at Fair Park for the first time and it was a sold-out opening. A huge Broadway smash (it’s still playing to capacity crowds in New York),…
Eric Steele is a busy young Dallas playwright and screenwriter who thinks theater and film aren’t mutually exclusive art forms. With his show The Midwest Trilogy, now playing through April 7 at Second Thought Theatre, he’s combined two films and one live actor into a single 90-minute production. Just off…
Taking private, often painful experiences and making them public is the point of Oral Fixation (An Obsession with True Life Tales). The new monthly series of spoken-word performances drew a full house at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary Tuesday night. Seven writer-reader-actors took solo turns in the spotlight, offering stories loosely…
“That awkward moment when …” is a running theme in some of the best shows in this year’s busy Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Going on one more weekend, the festival crams more than 60 performances of 22 different productions into its 11-day schedule. Shows…
There are strange noises emanating from the earth’s core. There are even stranger noises booming down from the sky, according to witnesses around the world who’ve recorded them and put them up on YouTube. If, like me, you stay up nights watching these things and reading interweb posts about how…
Everyone watches television, but hardly anyone can tell you who invented it. Lightbulb? Edison. Telephone? Bell. TV? Huh? You’ll know a lot more after you see The Farnsworth Invention, a play by Aaron Sorkin getting its Dallas debut at Theatre Three. Sorkin, who won an Oscar for The Social Network,…
What writer Aaron Sorkin did with the founding of Facebook for his Oscar-winning screenplay The Social Network, he does with similar flourishes in his play about the fathers of television, The Farnsworth Invention. Getting its Dallas debut in an exceptionally zippy production at Theatre Three, the play is an explosive…
Here’s how small the Ochre House theater is: When the actors in Mean, Matthew Posey’s new musical about Charlie Manson, enter and exit, they use the front door of the place. A whoosh of wind comes in off the sidewalk on Exposition Avenue as actors two-step through the audience in…
