Young playwrights play the old shell game with their work these days. They write a TV sitcom pilot or a screenplay but try to pass it off as a piece for the stage. It’s easier to get plays done and theater producers are always on the prowl for the next…
Next Fall, the Geoffrey Nauffts play now running at Dallas Theater Center, presents a family acting out more issues than an episode of Dr. Phil. Mom and Dad (played by Kieran Connolly and Candy Buckley) are divorced. Dad’s an old-school Old South bigot who hates gays and minorities, but loves…
As Joni Mitchell sings it, “sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” That’s sort of the story of what happened to the play Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home, written by Texas actress and playwright Mary Rohde Scudday in the 1970s, when she was 24, and produced back…
Adam and Luke are the odd couple Neil Simon didn’t write. Funny, gay and in love, they’re the couple at the center of Geoffrey Nauffts’ tragicomic Next Fall, now onstage at Kalita Humphreys Theater. The Dallas Theater Center production was staged by artistic director Kevin Moriarty and features six damn…
A new musical with a book by Joe DiPietro opened this week on Broadway. It’s called Nice Work If You Can Get It and it stars Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara singing Flapper Era songs by George and Ira Gershwin. The New York Times’ critic Ben Brantley compared it to…
With its second festival of new plays starting Thursday, Nouveau 47 can now call it an “annual” event. The theater company in Margo Jones’ old space at the Magnolia Lounge, Fair Park, regards their outfit as a “gym for playwrights,” with special focus on developing and polishing scripts for production…
The incident at the heart of the fact-based Erik Ehn play Diamond Dick: The Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 is as trivial as, say, a teenager walking home from a corner store with some Skittles in his hand. The Project X production of this skillfully staged one-act continues through this…
There’s only one mystery in Theatre Three’s latest, The Art of Murder, and that is how it ever made it onto a professional stage. Sans suspense but with beaucoup bits of flat, witless writing, the two-act play is the work of Joe DiPietro, perpetrator of the dreckola musical I Love…
There may not be another 3-1/2-hour play that says as much about contemporary family life, and says it with such gritty realism, as Tracy Letts’ explosive, hilarious August: Osage County. Director René Moreno’s fine production up at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre winds up its three-week run April 22. It’s a chance…
The wild and wonderful Westons of Oklahoma are back. Think your family’s crazy? This bunch thrives on hard liquor and invective. As the subjects of Tracy Letts’ much-honored play August: Osage County, the Westons are the most pill-addled, booze-soaked, internecine American family to tear up a stage since the Tyrones…
Actors Jenny Ledel and Cameron Cobb have experience with ghosts. In last summer’s Hamlet at Shakespeare Dallas, they played Ophelia and the moody Dane in an especially dark take on the Bard’s dance with death. Now in Kitchen Dog Theater’s production of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, they…
Nouveau 47 Theatre at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park is building a reputation as a developer of interesting new plays. Their new works festival is coming up soon and they like to foster relationships with young writers and performers pouring heart, soul and fresh ideas onto the stage. Their…
A creepy mansion crawling with unhappy ghosts is the setting of Henry James’ spooky 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, now playing at Kitchen Dog Theater in a spiffy, stripped-down stage adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher. Jenny Ledel lets hysteria build slowly in her portrayal of a newly hired governess…
On Monday night, April 2, WaterTower Theatre opens the first local production of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer- and Tony-winning masterpiece, August: Osage County. The sprawling drama has been compared with O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Imagine O’Neill’s troubled Tyrone family turned into the wacked-out Westons of Oklahoma. The WaterTower show,…
They’ll make you wear a nametag at Bryant Hall, set up like a hotel conference room for Second Thought Theatre’s mixed-media production of Dallas playwright Eric Steele’s The Midwest Trilogy. There’s free coffee in Styrofoam cups and cheap cookies, fuel for an 80-minute production that includes two short films and…
All rise for Superior Donuts. Tracy Letts’ funny little play about lonely people has brought light and laughter (and the scent of coffee and tasty pastries) to Theatre Too, the 80-seat space below Theatre Three. They’ve created a fully functioning South Side Chicago doughnut shop down there, run by a…
Uptown Players, take a bow. Ten years ago this gay-focused theater company, started by executive producers Craig Lynch and Jeff Rane, put on little shows with little money in a tiny hole of a space off Stemmons Freeway. Now they occupy the 400-seat, city-owned, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Kalita Humphreys Theater…
Those who were in the audience that night in October 2005 remember it well. The national tour of Wicked had hit the Music Hall at Fair Park for the first time and it was a sold-out opening. A huge Broadway smash (it’s still playing to capacity crowds in New York),…
Eric Steele is a busy young Dallas playwright and screenwriter who thinks theater and film aren’t mutually exclusive art forms. With his show The Midwest Trilogy, now playing through April 7 at Second Thought Theatre, he’s combined two films and one live actor into a single 90-minute production. Just off…
Dallas Comedy House took a bath in funny pheromones then baited in talent from across the country for this year’s Dallas Comedy Festival, which runs from March 27 through April 1. The lineup looks slammin,’ and we’ll have interviews with the comedians up until the fest kicks off, so that…
“That awkward moment when …” is a running theme in some of the best shows in this year’s busy Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Going on one more weekend, the festival crams more than 60 performances of 22 different productions into its 11-day schedule. Shows…
Somewhere in Fitness Heaven, Jack LaLanne’s biceps are smiling down, preparing their spiritual descent upon Dallas tomorrow night in a Pentecost of absurd artistic revelry. You see, just like the late-great LaLanne’s epic stature, from his Kilimanjaro pectorals to his Stonehenge quadriceps, monumental strength is often best realized in concert,…
