There’s a long held idea, fabricated by an optimistic adult that the stories we tell teenagers should be optimistic, aspirational. Maybe that’s why it comes to picking books for curriculums we ban the ones that even sniff of hardship, violence or reality. But if you give a group of teenagers…
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and musicals go together about as well as milk and stomach problems. Or at least that’s what you might think. Somehow, though, a Dallas Comedy House troupe made it work. And it’s hella funny. On Friday night, Law and Order SVUiscal premiered to a…
WaterTower Theatre in Addison has trouble getting musicals right and just about every aspect of its current production of Sweet Charity is wrong. That’s being charitable. Actors who can’t sing. Dancers with no sense of rhythm. A set better suited for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. So much dark lumber…
Some musicals are plot-driven, with a few numbers interspersed here and there, but a musical about one of the most beloved record labels of all time and its founder should have lots of them. In that sense, Motown: The Musical surely delivers — perhaps even beyond what is desired or…
For three weeks in July, Undermain Theatre’s co-artistic director, Katherine Owens, was shuttling between a rehearsal hall and a luxurious mountain home, where she roomed with a handful of nationally renowned theater artists. Owens was there as part of Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab to work alongside Len Jenkin in the development…
What has 54 legs and flies? Catch Me if You Can, the 27-person musical now cruising along at high altitude at Uptown Players at Kalita Humphreys Theater. What a show! What a cast! What a way to close out the strongest season yet for the little company out-producing the Dallas…
It’s a scientific fact. Somewhere in the world, there’s at least one screen showing an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. It doesn’t matter if it’s an old person watching a rerun on USA because they mistook it for Matlock or a serial downloader watching an illegally obtained episode…
Be afeard, the aisle is full of noises. Also the stage, the exits and the stairwell in Second Thought Theatre’s slam-bang-hollerin’ production of Othello at Bryant Hall. What’s with all the Shoutspeare going on this summer? Shakespeare Dallas put microphones on all the actors in its outdoor Romeo & Juliet…
Three of Dallas’ oldest theater companies — Kitchen Dog Theater, Theatre Three and Dallas Theater Center — are undergoing major transitions that could usher in dramatic changes as their shows go on. For Kitchen Dog, it’s a new temporary home inside the Green Zone, a smallish stand-alone performance space on…
At last, some performances to get goose pimply about at the Festival of Independent Theatres, going on two more weekends at the Bath House Cultural Center. The first weekend brought forth Danielle Georgiou’s lively demi-dance-musical The Show About Men, which is exactly that and a lot of fun, and the…
You never know when inspiration will strike. It might lurk between the pages of a history textbook. For 17-year-old Chris Rodenbaugh, inspiration struck sometime in the 20th century while reading about the Irish Republican Army. He remembers reading about this violent rebellion for the first time in Tom Clancy’s Patriot…
If summer is giving you a case of Holly Golightly’s mean reds, join the club. You can’t have the blues in Dallas summers because you can’t gaze out your window longingly at the rain, because the water is drying up in the soul-sucking summer sun. Instead, the dash from one…
Inside D1 Sports Training, 30 women perform a newly learned dance routine on a small basketball gym floor. One woman, in the back, stops mid-performance to fix her top after realizing it had come undone. None of the other women notice because they are solely focused on their performance. It’s…
So many elements are sublime in the world premiere production of Brenda Withers’ The Quixotic Days and Errant Nights of the Knight Errant Don Quixote at Fort Worth’s Amphibian Stage. Director Matthew Earnest has put together a superb ensemble of local actors: Kitchen Dog star Jeremy Schwartz as Don Quixote,…
There are no prizes given to the best shows in the Festival of Independent Theatres, now in its 17th year at the Bath House Cultural Center at White Rock Lake. But there clearly were winners and losers among the first four of the eight productions that compose this year’s fest…
The Oddball Comedy Comedy and Curiosity Festival has become more than just an excuse to throw a bunch of comedians together on the same stage. It’s only three years old but it’s quickly become the cultural barometer for comedy in America. If you get a headlining spot on Funny or…
A whole lot of “yeehaw!” and yodeling goes on in The Kountry Girls, a new musical that just debuted at Theatre Three. That’s right, “Kountry” with a K. Because misspelled words are the hallmarks of great komedy. The “girls,” Dee Dee (Alexis Nabors) and May (Kelly Silverthorn), sling hash in their…
Time is an illusion, said Albert Einstein. No past, no future. Just existence in the dimension we perceive as the present. The theory of relativity might explain why Shakespeare Dallas director Raphael Parry has taken a 90-minute comedy, The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), and stretched it out to…
If you want to start a hullabaloo in the Dallas arts, tell a theater festival it might be time for a curtain call. That’s what our theater critic Elaine Liner wrote last year about the Festival of Independent Theatres, the annual event at the Bath House Cultural Center meant to…
If you go to a comedy club with the intention of getting drunk or even just enjoying a stiff drink, you have poor priorities in life. Going to a comedy club for drinks is like buying an airline ticket to score some peanuts. Any lightly seasoned alcoholic will tell you that…
Director Kevin Smith has added a second Dallas show to Texas Theatre this fall and now Jason Mewes will be along for the ride. After selling out a spoken word performance that will no doubt involve a long Q&A session, Smith has added a podcast recording of “Jay & Silent…
For a guy who murders two men and drives a 13-year-old girl to suicide, Romeo sure gets good PR spin in history. Thanks to William Shakespeare and centuries of skewed interpretation, “Romeo” is now synonymous with “great lover.” But considering what the boy gets up to in Romeo & Juliet,…
