The real world beyond their stage doors may have been spinning from disaster to disaster, but somehow in the land of make-believe inside Dallas theaters, 2011 turned out to be an absolute annus mirabilis. There were great shows and memorable performances in grand halls and bijou playhouses all around us…
The greatest old broad on TV, Betty White, doesn’t just outlive her contemporaries; she outworks them, too. She’s about to turn 90 and will celebrate with a TV special, Betty White’s 90th Birthday: A Tribute to America’s Golden Girl, airing at 7 p.m. CT, Monday, January 16, on NBC. Joining…
You have until Christmas Eve to catch Dallas Theater Center’s robust production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. For this one, the company moves back to its old home at Kalita Humphreys Theater on Turtle Creek, and that’s a treat. Kalita really is such a perfectly snug place to stage…
Outside, standing toward the back of a line of 500 or so fans of the MTV reality show Jersey Shore, Janessa Salas, 12, and her mother Stacey were super excited about getting VIP tickets to meet Snooki. Janessa, a seventh grader at Allen’s Curtis Middle School, was dressed in Snooki-like…
He survived schlepping Fed Ex boxes for Hollywood fashion stylist Rachel “It’s bananas” Zoe, and now Brad Goreski will star in his own cable TV “docu series,”It’s a Brad, Brad World. Premiering at 9 p.m. CT, Monday, January 2, the show is a spin-off of The Rachel Zoe Project, following…
There’s something to be said for seeing the world in shades of gray. For 26 years that’s been the philosophy of Dallas’ Pegasus Theatre, which performs its annual murder mystery comedy in trademarked “Living Black and White” style. This year’s show, opening at the Eisemann Center in Richardson on December…
Given that their core audience comes on buses from places where risk-taking might mean eating dinner past 5, One Thirty Productions is surprisingly edgy with the choice of Greetings! as a Christmas season play. Tom Dudzick, sometimes called the “Catholic Neil Simon,” has written something that ventures way outside any…
Let’s shorthand it, shall we? Because in Twitterworld, who needs complete sentences? U w/me, ppl? -Birds are angry. -Alec Baldwin is angry. He plays Words with Friends. (He has friends?) -Be angry at college coaches in the showers. -Steve Jobs’ sister, Mona Simpson, delivers best eulogy ever. -Two presidential candidates…
If you haven’t experienced the wacky tradition of the holiday season English “panto,” get yourself to Theatre Britain’s production of Jackie Mellor-Guin’s Dick Whittington, currently onstage at Plano’s Cox Building Playhouse. It’s broad comedy on two levels: a fun fairytale for the kiddies, some mildly bawdy double entendres for the…
There’s something to be said for seeing the world in shades of gray. For 26 years that’s been the philosophy of Dallas’ Pegasus Theatre, which performs its annual murder mystery comedy in trademarked “Living Black and White” style. This year’s show, opening at the Eisemann Center in Richardson on December…
Let’s shorthand it, shall we? Because in Twitterworld, who needs complete sentences? U w/me, ppl? -January 2011. Eleven lifetimes ago. Hop-skip through year’s tops and flops in pop culture. -Golden Globes. Host Ricky Gervais offends Cruise, not Depp. (And he’ll be back.) James Franco co-hosts Oscars. Good tweeter backstage. Big…
Like Ebenezer Scrooge, a certain rotund, snow-haired, thrice-married GOP presidential candidate regards poor children as slackers. “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid,” Newt Gingrich told an audience at Harvard a few weeks ago. He’d like to put…
If you remember flopping on the divan in your flannels and scuffies to watch TV Christmas specials starring Perry Como, the King Sisters and the Osmonds back in the day, you’ll feel right at home at WaterTower Theatre’s Rockin’ Christmas Party. The show is a nostalgia-filled musical cheese ball, rolled…
For its eighth season, Second Thought Theatre, the small-ensemble company founded by Baylor grads, will move back to where it started — or close to it. Second Thought is leaving the Addison Theatre Centre’s black box studio and relocating to 75-seat Bryant Hall, across the parking lot from Kalita Humphreys…
Theater Caps are bite-sized punch-packing capsule reviews by resident theater critic Elaine Liner. Use them as a reminder — or a teaser, if you procrastinate — of her full-length reviews in The Mixmaster’s weekly sister. There’s always humor and elegance in the shows performed at Dallas Children’s Theater by the…
Part of the fun of Dallas Theater Center’s huge production of A Christmas Carol, opening Friday night for a three-week run at Kalita Humphreys Theater, is seeing who plays the ghosts that visit Ebenezer Scrooge. In the spooky adaptation by Richard Hellesen of Charles Dickens’ immortal story of greed v…
The title of WaterTower Theatre’s revival of Rockin’ Christmas Party is missing its “g” for a reason. Throughout the two-plus hours of singin’ and dancin’, you’ll keep thinkin’ to yourself, “Gee, what does that song have to do with Christmas?” and “Gee, why are those ladies wearing Conehead wigs and…
T’was the night(s) before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring ‘cept you and your mouse. Click, click, click to these 11 merry moments of TV Christmas specials past — some classic, some bizarre — preserved online and ready to be rediscovered on YouTube and Hulu…
If the run-through Monday night is any indication of the breadth of talent taking part in the December 6 benefit event called A Gathering, the real thing is going to be quite a show. In the ninth floor studio at the Wyly Theatre, actors, singers, musicians and dancers rehearsed their…
At the Monday night Open Stage talent show in Richardson, the emcee, Russ Sharek, shows the audience the “Positivity Pill.” It’s a stuffed toy shaped like a capsule and it’s tossed at anyone who doesn’t give the performers upbeat feedback. No booing allowed here and no “keeping score” about which…
It’s a quarter to 8 on a Monday night at Open Stage, the weekly talent showcase at House of Poets in Richardson, and the incense is growing Vatican-thick. The show happens on a raised platform along one wall of an oblong banquet hall at the back of a shopping center,…
If you have to use “the Method” to act excited about seeing in-laws at your holiday gatherings, you have something in common with all the actors in Scrooge and Santa drag night after night from now till New Year’s. Sure, it’s a job for them, sometimes even one that pays…
