Imagine Ben-Hur acted out on a stage the size of a twin bed and you’ve got The Big Bang. Pure madness is what it is, the funniest, sweatiest three-man musical ever to condense the history of civilization to less than an hour and a half. They start the timeline with…
Bring on the rain. This ghastly musical by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown plods along like a tired circus beast as it tells the story of Leo Frank, a young Jewish factory manager in 1913 Atlanta who is railroaded to a guilty verdict in the rape and murder of…
Look at James and the Giant Peach through the eyes of a 5-year-old and you’ll see a cute play about a sad British orphan boy who grows a big piece of fruit, makes friends with giant bugs and lives happily ever after in New York City. A super-sized stage adaptation…
Wendy Wasserstein wrote An American Daughter more than a decade before Hillary Rodham Clinton’s election to the Senate and her push toward the presidency, before Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House. Condoleezza Rice, as the newly appointed Stanford University provost, wasn’t yet a major political power player in 1993,…
Seafood is brain food” says the motto on the menu at Fish Express. Given the name of the place, an expectation of good fish served quickly would seem to be a no-brainer. Here, however, they have adopted the Amtrak model of “express.” Place an order at the walk-up counter on…
Finally, Dallas Theater Center does August Wilson. Only took them 20 years to get around to it. That’s about how long Wilson’s work has been part of the American theater conversation. Better late than never. Fences, which just opened in an astonishingly well-acted production at DTC, is one of the…
Cara Statham Serber, Megan Kelly, Patty Breckenridge, Stacey Oristano and Sara Shelby-Martin crowd the top shelf of Dallas’ professional musical comedy performers. So it’s heaping helpings of fun watching them wallow around in the bargain bin bit of entertainment called The Great American Trailer Park Musical, now sweating up the…
When Hair and its hirsute cast of young hippies hit off-Broadway 40 years ago, the American theater establishment reacted with finger-in-light-socket shrieks. Boston banned it. Major critics dismissed it. Patrons paying a top ticket price of $2.50 complained of its “deafening” pop-rock score and deplored its profanity and sexual content…
To say the service and pacing of courses at Le Rendezvous is leisurely is to make them sound too rushed. This newly reopened French place on the southwest corner of Royal Lane at Preston Road adheres to the classic continental style, meaning continents could shift a smidge in the time…
The box of Kleenex on each table is the tip-off. Shadowlands, the latest production at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, is a four-tissue romance about an unlikely couple and the deep love they share only when one of them is dying. The story’s a heartbreaker to the end, so why is…
If a word of Moonlight and Magnolias, the comedy now on the big stage at Dallas Theater Center, is true, then the movie version of Gone With the Wind could have ended up as The Da Vinci Code of 1939. Ron Hutchinson’s play suggests—no, it insists—that early in production, producer…
Great casting makes great theater. For The Miracle Worker to work as well as it does in Dallas Children’s Theater’s current production, it’s not enough just to find a young actress who can fling herself into the furniture portraying blind and deaf Helen Keller as a child. The role of…
We know Shakepeare’s Hamlet for its famous brace of be’s, as in the title character’s existential wondering re: “to” or “not to.” Charlotte Jones’ gentle, witty and enthralling play Humble Boy takes the bare bones of Hamlet, updates the location to a pretty cottage in the Cotswolds, makes the troubled…
Hearing that Deep Ellum Café is back in business in its original location at 2706 Elm St. is like finding out that a good old friend has moved back to the neighborhood. This was one of our favorite haunts in the late 1980s, back when Deep Ellum was coming into…
For its first 20 minutes, Democracy painstakingly documents events surrounding the 1969 election of left-leaning politician Willy Brandt to the post of chancellor of West Germany’s democratic parliament. If that sentence bores you down to your lederhosen, just wait till you hear what’s in the rest of this 150-minute drama…
Check out Scott Colby’s Women’s Fitness Camps at http://www.womensfitnesscamp.com. Or call him at 214-505-8504. Join Colby’s free co-ed Playground Fitness Club at Meetup.com (http://fitness.meetup.com/236/). The next scheduled playground workout is 9 a.m., January 20, on the playground at the intersection of Lexington Avenue and St. John’s Drive in Highland Park…
As kids we didn’t call it exercise. We called it playing outside. We didn’t take spinning classes; we rode bikes. We also jumped rope, rollerbladed, ran ourselves breathless around the yard yelling “You’re it!” and built up our biceps and triceps climbing trees. It was fun. It still is, which…
A bad review can be murder. So let’s establish right now that actor-writer Kurt Kleinmann and his merry band of Pegasus Theatre players are first-rate, top-notch, good-looking, love-their-shoes artistic geniuses who deserve every kind adjective, gilded accolade, naked statue and freebie-stuffed goody bag their profession allows. Kiss, kiss, hug, hug…
Ready to work out outside? Be sure you… Dress in layers during cold weather. Wear hat and gloves to prevent heat loss. Invest in a good pair of walking, running or cycling shoes right from the start. Bring plenty of water. It’s easier to get dehydrated outdoors. Do a thorough…
For nearly a decade, Dallas theaters benefited from an unlikely patron saint: Chuck Norris. With his CBS action series Walker, Texas Ranger, shot in North Texas from 1993 to 2001, Norris employed many a local actor to stand on the receiving end of his title character’s faked karate fan-kicks. Regular…
Part Christmas pageant, part tent revival, Jubilee Theatre’s jubilant Black Nativity could make a heathen care about the reason for the season. So full of the spirit are these heavenly hosts—a cast of 11 actor-singers, including Jubilee stalwarts Robert Rouse and Janice L. Jeffery—that when the production in the 147-seat…
Holy, holy, moly. Go to WaterTower Theatre, if you dare, to witness the “world premiere” of Happy Holi-divas!, a craptacular sleigh ride of Christmas-themed claptrap that will jingle-jangle you into a headache that goes pah-rum-pah-pum-pum on the top of your skull. In one two-hour musical revue, collaborating writers James Paul…
