WaterTower Theatre’s tenth annual Out of the Loop Fringe Festival is a busy buffet of talent spread among three venues at the sprawling Addison venue. You can gorge yourself on all the offerings over 11 days, or just pick and choose, nibbling among the ones you’ve heard are good. With…
In ancient times, there were “air hostesses.” If you have never been through an airport without being forced to remove footwear, you are too young to remember pretty armies of exotic airline goddesses in kicky miniskirts and calf-hugging boots. They were the go-go geishas of international travel, stirring cocktails and…
They’re up to new tricks at Matthew Posey’s Ochre House theater, that odd little hotbox of freakishly entertaining original work written, directed by and starring Mr. Posey. His latest is Memphos!, a 90-minute look at the last performance of the last-worst act in old-timey vaudeville. Posey plays the title character,…
Dallas Theater Center has done the only reasonable thing it could to make that nuttiest of old chestnuts, Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, bearable. In the leads are two big Broadway stars, Tony winner (and Fort Worth native) Betty Buckley and four-time Tony nominee Tovah Feldshuh. That…
This week’s big event over at the shiny barn in Arlington is all about possession of the pigskin, right? Coincidentally, Dallas Children’s Theater, named by Time magazine one of the country’s top five professional theaters for young audiences, has a stage filled with porkers. And one really unhappy wolf. DCT…
Deconstruct the features of Dallas actor Steven Walters and it’s hard to believe they constitute the attributes of a great stage performer. There’s his voice: high, a little nasal, with a hint of Texas twang and audible hisses on sibilant consonants. There’s his chin, strong but soft. His long nose…
As a cultural, historical icon exploited for stage and screen, Frankenstein’s Monster is right up there with Jesus, Abe Lincoln and Santa Claus. You know the Monster at first glance: bolts through the neck, Cro Magnon forehead, ugly shoes. With a vocabulary limited to “fire bad!” and “friend good!,” he…
Feels good to start the theater year with some laughs. First show of 2011, Death Is No Small Change!, is right on the money. It’s the new comedy from Pegasus Theatre, now performing its yearly three-week run at the Eisemann Center in Richardson. There’s nothing like a Pegasus show and…
Funny how the little moments in some plays stay with you. An actor wiping a tear from his cheek in a quiet scene in Our Town. That same actor, Joey Folsom, angrily tearing through a package of Oreos in subUrbia. Estelle Parsons reeling down the stairs in August: Osage County…
For the past few months at Dallas Theater Center, Mark Hadley was forgotten but not gone. He announced last July that after 10 years as managing director of the city’s largest professional theater, he would be leaving for a new job. But he stayed mum about what the new gig…
“I hate theater,” a whiny voice in the dark says at the tippy-top of The Drowsy Chaperone. “Well, it’s so disappointing, isn’t it?” The Man in Chair, as he’s called in this creampuff of a musical, continues for a few more lines before the lights come up. He expresses his…
You can’t swing an elf without hitting a Christmas-themed play or musical in Dallas theaters this week. And for swinging elves, there’s no better one than Crumpet, the sassy alter ego of writer David Sedaris in his one-man comedy short, The Santaland Diaries. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas has produced this…
The leading role in Kitchen Dog Theater’s Charm fits actress Tina Parker like a velvet glove. But the character she plays, 19th century writer, feminist and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, wasn’t the glove-wearing sort, though she lived in glove-and-corset-wearing times. Kathleen Cahill’s immensely satisfying 90-minute biographical comedy, getting its Southwest premiere…
Except for the title and some dropped-in references to Parkland Hospital, Neiman Marcus and the long-gone H.L. Green downtown five-and-dime, the setting of The Trinity River Plays feels as geographically generic as the towns do in daytime soaps. So scant is the sense of Dallas-ness in Regina Taylor’s new trilogy…
“Play should make you understand something new,” says a character in Nilaja Sun’s brief, beautiful play, No Child. Good plays can enlighten. Bad plays can, too, even if it’s only teaching you something about remaining politely silent and relatively still in a small, hard seat for a couple of hours…
Every night of live theater is an adventure. When things go right, it’s a thrill ride. When things go wrong, as they did at the final preview of Lyric Stage’s premiere of the musical adaptation of The Night of the Hunter, it’s like stumbling through a carnival fun house. The…
What are you up for? A play about a guy who shoots a dog? A play about yuppie parents who poison a lady with pesto? How about a comedy with typists who murder lumberjacks to score men’s better-made outerwear? Let’s start with the most entertaining one (by far), The Secretaries,…
The Edward Albee one-acts that WingSpan Theatre Company is doing right now taste as bitter and icy as dry martinis. The American Dream and The Sandbox, both directed by Susan Sargeant, are bracing cocktails of absurdist humor. The production at the Bath House Cultural Center serves them with great style…
A farting contest in the middle of Shrek the Musical turns out to be one of its classiest moments. The competition takes place between the title character, an okra-colored ogre played by Eric Petersen, and the object of his affection, a rescued red-haired princess named Fiona (Haven Burton). In the…
A full moon bathes a window in sugary white. A train whistles. Bacon curls in a skillet. These simple sensory references are part of everyday life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the United States, Western Hemisphere, the Earth, the solar system, the universe—the way one character addresses the fictional village…
What Hamlet says about mothers and sons, Henry IV says about fathers (and father figures) and sons. Shakespeare’s drama about medieval kings, now getting a handsome, if gimmick-strewn, production at Dallas Theater Center, presents a troubled royal son, Hal, the Prince of Wales, and his uneasy relationships with his father…
The bigger the show, the smaller the revival. Vintage American musicals keep getting make-unders on Broadway. The trend began with 2005’s Sweeney Todd, a shoestring affair imported from London that forced the cast to double as the onstage “orchestra.” Star Patti Lupone awkwardly blew into a tuba. And thus diminished,…
