You Should Be Going Going To Boeing-Boeing

Summer is the season for light comedy at the theater and Boeing-Boeing, the farce now running at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, will have your giggle muscles going boing-boing for two solid hours of funny. It’s a 1960s play, resuscitated successfully on Broadway three years ago, about one playboy (played here by…

Olympics Bound, Dallas Black Dance Theatre Sets its Sights on London 2012

It’s not the first prestigious invitation that Dallas Black Dance Theatre has received, simply the most recent. The oldest, continuously operated professional dance company in Dallas, DBDT has built an extensive résumé of elite performances, representing the city everywhere from Washington state to New York to Austria. Since its founding…

High-Flying Boeing-Boeing Hits Comedy Stratosphere

Shut the front door. And the kitchen door. And the bathroom and bedroom doors. If it’s a farce, and WaterTower Theatre’s Boeing-Boeing is a classic one, count on doors swinging open and slamming shut with split-second precision. The six characters in this 1962 Marc Camoletti sex comedy burn oodles of…

Ruth Rises at Kitchen Dog’s New Play Fest

Like fellow Oklahoman Tracy Letts (of August: Osage County fame), playwright Vicki Caroline Cheatwood has a good ear for how people in that state talk to each other. Plain-spoken, yes, but with a certain poetry to the flow of everyday speech. She’s lived in Dallas for many years, but Cheatwood…

KDT’s Ruth Links Dust Bowl Okies to Modern Xenophobia

Where are the great new American plays coming from? Not just from East Coast graduate programs that follow the Paula (How I Learned to Drive) Vogel model, no matter how many of those dreary dramas Dallas Theater Center tries to force upon us. Not from the ranks of hot TV…

DTC’s God of Carnage: A Comedy of Manners, Vomiting

There isn’t a “splatter zone” for Dallas Theater Center’s production of the play God of Carnage, but maybe there should be. A massive, catastrophic bout of vomiting by a character happens early on, a wave of chunky barf that splashes over the scenery furniture and across the floor of the…

Lysistrata Brings Sexy Back to the Opera House

Memorial day weekend marked the third installment of Fort Worth Opera’s four-weekend long opera festival, as well as the company’s regional premiere of Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata. This year’s festival draws from a wide range of old and new, light and dark, serious and comedic in its offerings, and the four…

At Ochre House Theater, It’s (Henry) Miller Time

When Ochre House founder Matthew Posey gets his teeth into something, he takes big bites. For his latest play, Cicerone, he’s masticating his way through the life and loves of Tropic of Cancer author Henry Miller. As playwright, director and star of this production, Posey gives himself the best role,…

Stage West Lets Molly Ivins Say it All

At Fort Worth’s Stage West, Texas’ brashest political commentator lives again in the one-woman play Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins. Actress Georgia Clinton portrays Ivins in the production directed by Dana Schultes. The 70-minute performance, written by twin journalists Allison and Margaret Engel, is built around…

Urban Savages Slug it out in God of Carnage; Cicerone Needs to Cheer Up

Are we barbarians under our civilized veneers? Or are we just big babies in grown-up clothes, ready to throw tantrums when we don’t get our way? French playwright Yazmina Reza’s Tony-winning 2009 play God of Carnage (translated by Christopher Hampton) asks those and other questions about adults who should know…

In Ruth, Vicki Cheatwood Explores Life’s Darkest Stages

Dallas writer Vicki Cheatwood’s new play Ruth is a modern retelling of the Ruth and Naomi story from the Old Testament. What Cheatwood went through personally while writing it, however, sounds more like the Book of Job. Debuting Friday, May 25, at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary as the centerpiece of…

Red Green Doles Out Wisdom, Tonight at Lakewood Theater

Children of public broadcasting know Steve Smith as Red Green, the king of duct tape inventiveness. His Canadian program held its place on the dial for 300 episodes, inviting all who tuned in to receive Smith’s folksy dispatches from Possum Lodge, a quirky men’s club resting just beyond the periphery…

DCT Swats it Out of the Park with Diary of a Worm, a Spider & a Fly.

Something bugging you? Hop over to Dallas Children’s Theater to catch the regional premiere of the delightful Diary of a Worm, a Spider & a Fly. The 20-song “feeler”-good musical by Joan Cushing, directed by Bob Hess, adapts three eco-conscious children’s books by Doreen Cronin. In 105 minutes of creepy-crawly…

Natasha Leggero’s Coming To Charm You While Talking Smack

Yep, this clip is super old and rather dated, but it’s still funny. This brassy lady is part of Chelsea Handler’s clique of touring broads. You’ve seen her as the semi-evil waitress in Are You There Chelsea? and as a recurring panelist on Chelsea Lately. Known for her whip-smart approach…

Silence is Golden (Then, Not)

To get down with Uptown Players and Upstart Productions, you’d better be up on your movies. Both theater companies have shows right now paying homage to specific film genres. Uptown takes on the serial killer thriller with one of playwright Jamie Morris’ campy spoofs, The Silence of the Clams. It’s…