Casting news for local plays isn’t usually headline-worthy. Unless, that is, the artistic director from one major theater is cast as an actor in a much-anticipated production at another major theater. That’s the inside-baseball scoop about WaterTower Theatre honcho Terry Martin showing up as the lead in Dallas Theater Center’s…

The kids in the sweet, funny new play The Chicken Who Wasn’t Chicken, running in Plano through Sunday, February 26, don’t know how lucky they are. The script is a new one from Matt Lyle, a former Dallas writer and actor who went on to Second City’s writing program in…

The guys hanging out together in Steven Walters’ get-down funny play Pluck the Day are old high school buds, now in their 30s and starting to go to seed. Duck, the former gridiron star (played with lovable stupidity by Clay Yocum), and brainy Bill (Chris LaBove) are worried about their…

“A long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy.” Charles Manson said that. If anybody’s qualified to weigh in on crazy, it’s Charlie Manson. He’s 77 now, in his 42nd year of a life sentence. In the Ochre House theater’s chilling, strangely thrilling new show Mean, set in…

Tennessee Williams had a weird thing about hotels, beaches and death. In his play The Night of the Iguana, currently onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the rundown Costa Verde beach resort in Mexico acts as the holiday getaway for the Grim Reaper. Every guest who checks in is on…

In his new solo show Beyond Words, Bill Bowers combines mime, music and text to tell stories from his life growing up in Montana. He also shares some stories from other lives, including one about a small-town boy from Sherwood Anderson’s short fiction collection Winesburg, Ohio. Beyond Words is one…

Sometimes a play is worth seeing for the words the actors are saying. Sometimes it’s for the actors saying the words. See Collapse, a new play by Allison Moore at Kitchen Dog Theater, for the red hot performance by actor Michael Federico, the closest Dallas theater has to a Paul…

A few good men were involved in the invention of television. That’s the subject of the play The Farnsworth Invention, written by Oscar and Emmy winner Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, The Social Network, Moneyball) and opening tonight at 7:30 p.m. in previews at Theatre Three, where it will run through…

A lot of drinking and heavy thinking can happen on a hot day on a veranda. Two good shows running on Dallas stages right now — The Night of the Iguana at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas and Pluck the Day at Second Thought Theatre — take place on big porches,…

It may never win a Tony but Bring It On: The Musical deserves a solid gold spirit stick for mixing the dynamic moves of those cheerleading competitions on ESPN with the happy-peppy singing and dancing by the kids on Glee. The national tour of the show, only loosely based on…

You know Mindy Kaling as Kelly Kapoor on six seasons of the NBC comedy The Office. But did you also know that Kaling won a whole bunch of awards portraying Ben Affleck? She did, co-starring with Brenda Withers off-Broadway in the play the two women wrote, the comedy Matt &…

Five years ago, actress Diana Sheehan had what she describes as “the most euphoric day of my life.” Both of her young children were in school all day at last and, for the first time in years, Sheehan found she was free to do whatever she wanted. “I danced for…

As small, intense, pull-your-hair-out comedies, the new plays Coyote and Collapse have a lot in common. Coyote, playing a few more performances at Nouveau 47’s tiny theater at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park, puts us out in the Arizona desert with a couple of those trigger-happy “Minutemen” militia guys…

This is the final weekend of performances of Coyote, a seat-gripper of a play at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park. Nouveau 47, the little troupe modeling itself on the Margo Jones theater company of 60 years ago, premieres Kevin Kautzman’s excellent script, which had its first reading here last…

Bick and Leslie’s Big Song in Giant There are many things amiss in the musical Giant, the Dallas Theater Center/Public Theater co-production playing a couple more weekends at the Wyly Theatre. But let’s just look at the top dozen. 1. These Yankees make rotten Texans. The whole cast of Giant…

Among the promising slate of new works by local playwrights debuting at this year’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, March 1-10 at WaterTower Theatre in Addison, is the dark comedy International Falls by Waco writer, actor and former stand-up comic Thomas Ward. It’s a 90-minute one-act, premiering on WaterTower’s…

A giant of a musical opened here the other night, but it wasn’t Giant, the horseless cowpoke operetta now plodding along at the Wyly Theatre, a co-production between Dallas Theater Center and New York’s Public Theater. It was Kismet at Irving’s Lyric Stage, a four-performance concert that ticked all the…

Former American Idol finalist Constantine Maroulis has turned into one of Broadway’s favorite leading men. It was announced in January that he’ll star as both title roles in the New York revival of Frank Wildhorn’s musical Jekyll & Hyde in 2013. Maroulis was a Tony nominee a few years ago…

You need two things when you do the musical Hairspray: a fat girl to play the lead character, Tracy Turnblad, and a bunch of African-American kids to play the African-American kids. There are about a dozen roles for young black performers in this show, plus one for a big black…

You have 35 days to get that great play you’ve been writing finished and entered in the next Festival of Independent Theatres. FITfest, as it’s redundantly known, is the quirky-wonderful midsummer showcase of new plays and small theater companies, many of which don’t have their own home spaces to perform…

Playwright Sarah Ruhl, still in her 30s, is a favorite of the “edgy” theater companies around here. But why? Her plays are witless and obtuse, hardly worth producing, much less paying to see. Melancholy Play, one of her early works (from 2001), is on view now at Upstart Productions at…