The Cherry Torture, critics often call it. And for good reasons. Anton Chekhov’s final play babbles on and on for four acts of increasingly tedious arrivals and departures by more than a dozen oddball characters. Actors enter with great flourish to announce that they must be going, and then they…
Richard Greenberg asks a simple but intriguing question in his play The Violet Hour, now onstage at Dallas Theater Center. Given a peek into the future, would any of us take an existential do-over and alter the decisions we made early in life? Charles Dickens used the same device in…
Life is short and sweet, savor every minute. So says the message of The Living End, a quartet of charming yet provocative mini-musicals about life and death now on view at Lyric Stage in Irving. No, life stinks, according to the new Risk Theater Initiative show at the Bath House…
In the classic “actor’s nightmare,” you’re standing center stage in the spotlight. The audience stares, waiting for your next line. Behind you, costumed performers fidget, wondering why you haven’t picked up your cue. You have no idea what play you’re in, why you never rehearsed or what you’re supposed to…
Writing the little play about big ideas is playwright Lee Blessing’s specialty. He did it with A Walk in the Woods–one Russian diplomat, one American (both male) take a stroll and decide the future of nuclear arms–and he does it with Going to St. Ives, now playing in its local…
Forget, if you want to, that A Country Life is based on Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (originally subtitled Scenes From a Country Life). Chekhov is too tough to digest, so many long Russian names to swallow and heavy soliloquies to chew on for three or four acts. It’s better to…
Being terribly clever can make for terrible comedy. Freedomland, Amy Freed’s odd play about a family of brilliant eccentrics, spews clever lines 90 to nothing for more than two hours. “Sentimentality is a form of murderous aggression,” quips art critic Titus (Lee Trull), staring at a kitschy painting titled “Clowns…
The audience is 50 percent of the performance,” said the great old actress Shirley Booth. At least that much, I’d say. Maybe more. A good audience can inspire and ignite actors into giving the best performances of their lives. And a bad crowd can do just the opposite. Every actor…
Can Snoopy be due for a comeback? Back in the 1960s and ’70s, the black and white beagle and his pie-faced little pals from Charles M. Schulz’s cartoon strip Peanuts reigned as beloved pop-culture icons, up there with rock stars and astronauts. Even during the flower power years, more than…
Zombies do not deliver Christmas cheer. A small squad of the eerie undead stomp onstage to represent the Spirits of Christmases Yet to Come in Act 2 of Dallas Theater Center’s A Christmas Carol. They step-drag, step-drag in front of Ebenezer Scrooge (James Carpenter). Rising from the misty graveyard in…
There are only so many Cratchits and Nutcrackers and flock-watching shepherds a person can stomach this time of year. It’s nice to see theaters offering alternatives to the traditional tinsel-dripping holiday hooha. Opening over the next couple of weeks: Theatre Britain’s lighthearted “panto” version of Snow White at Trinity River…
They’re packing ’em in over at Teatro Dallas for the touring production of Making Porn, a lurid little comedy about the gay porn industry that stars one of its bigger, um, talents. That would be Matthew Rush, a puffy-lipped he-man with arms that hang like chuck roasts from his massive…
Tom Stoppard is a tough sell to the typical theatergoer. And by typical I mean a real die-hard fan of live performance who pays to see several plays a year. Most people don’t go to the theater. Ever. Just like most people don’t eat fried calf brains or read Doris…
The story goes that when Oscar Wilde traveled to America in 1881, he was asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare. “Only my genius,” he replied. The Irish-born poet, novelist and playwright was the Victorian era’s most quotable aesthete, famously spouting barbed aphorisms even to his…
Let’s do the time warp again and again and again. The Rocky Horror Show returns, this time at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, where the rip-roaring, raunchy fun starts well before the first glimpse of that “sweet transsexual,” Dr. Frank ‘N’ Furter (played by Paul Taylor as a cross-dressing cross between…
What is it about the blues that makes feeling bad feel so good? Two new productions are singing the blues in different ways–one musically, one satirically–but there’s something immensely satisfying for the theatergoer in both. It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues, the nostalgic revue that just opened the new season…
Now this is a party. Uptown Players close out their third season with an orgy of writhing bods and steamy hook-ups in a production of Andrew Lippa’s Jazz Age musical The Wild Party. It has it all in terms of R-rated box-office appeal: nudity, boy-boy kissing (what would this theater…
We need Atticus Finch. Dedicated, decent, a scholar and father, Finch is the main adult character in Harper Lee’s perfect 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. He’s a good man, this lawyer Finch, thoughtful, fair, loving and just. Whether from our adolescent acquaintance with him from a high school reading…
Angus can’t remember anything for five minutes. Or three minutes. Or two. He has a steel plate in his head from a war injury. His short-term memory is shot. He can count the stars in the night sky in one glance and add columns of numbers in a trice, but…
Smoke and poetry thicken the air in Anna in the Tropics, now onstage in an intensely passionate production at Dallas Theater Center. Set in a cigar factory outside Tampa in 1929, Nilo Cruz’s two-act play, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer for best new drama, unfolds like a hazy, sexy dream…
As midlife crises go, Marjorie Taub’s is a monster. In agony over the death of her therapist, Marjorie, the main character in Charles Busch’s comedy The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, is first seen by the audience at Theatre Three deep in menopausal malaise, wailing and whimpering like a wounded…
Flapping and honking like geese in a yard, the six female characters in Steel Magnolias are exaggerated versions of pushy Southern women as seen through the eyes of a gay man, playwright Robert Harling. For Love! Valour! Compassion!, gay playwright Terrence McNally gathers eight stereotypes of artsy, East Coast-y homosexual…
