Howard Kremer has an interesting challenge as a comedian and a musician. His shows have the structure of a concert but he also needs the response from a crowd that every comedian needs to make their shows work. A joke takes about a minute to tell from setup to punchline…
In Martyr, there’s not a likable character to be found. At least not in Second Thought Theatre’s production of it. Marius von Mayenburg’s moralistic tale of a teenager who seeks solace from adolescent confusions in the strictures of the Bible is treated without a hint of subtlety rendering it a…
Like acne scars that never fade, even as middle-age wrinkles carve tiny paths around them, the worst moments of our teen years remain etched forever on our psyches. It is the time in life most pocked by humiliation, shame and insecurity. Impulse control hasn’t yet kicked in. Mistakes are made…
Many great American plays have been written about big moments in otherwise small lives. Death of a Salesman. Summer and Smoke. A Raisin in the Sun. In these, the characters are ordinary people facing life-altering events: the loss of a job, devastating heartbreak, the struggle to rise out of poverty…
All the world’s a stage, but theaters have the most flattering lighting. Into the amber-gelled glare aimed down on Dallas stages in 2015 stepped hundreds of productions big and small. This remains a busy and constantly churning theater town. Seasons overlap. New shows open every week. Here’s a look back…
If there’s a running theme in this year’s entries in N47 Theatre’s A Very Nouveau Holiday mini-fest at the Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park, it’s that Christmas just isn’t the same after Mom dies. Or if you’re stuck at the airport with the Abominable Snowman. Or if a comic…
Deep in December it’s nice to remember a show as light and tuneful as The Fantasticks, now onstage for the ninth time at Theatre Three in the Quadrangle. Since 1960 the little musical love story by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt has been part of the American theater canon, with…
Ben Stevenson’s The Nutcracker is a stunning production with choreography exquisite enough to bring a Christmas dream to life and accentuate Tchaikovsky’s melodies. With athleticism and grace set to music, a story is magnificently told without words. Every performance makes use of 200 exotic costumes and there are three different…
Opening night of Le Sacre du printemps, better known to English speakers as The Rite of Spring, created one of dance history’s most infamous stories. With music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, this ballet concert opened in 1913 with the subtitle, “Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts.” Both the…
Any way you slice it, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is as classic a holiday offering as fruitcake. And like that redoubtable dessert, it’s best served fresh, a little nutty and with extra dollops of sweetness. Three DFW theaters are ending the year with productions of A Christmas Carol. They’re…
Rule No. 1 of British “panto”: Be ready to play and sing along. No, go ahead. You’ll enjoy it. The panto is a traditional form of British children’s theater that pops up at the holidays. A little naughty, a whole lot nice, pantos are typically based on familiar fairytales and…
What good reason might explain actor Leah Spillman being clad only in skimpy pink panties and a sheer white tank top in her first scene in Kitchen Dog Theater’s The Totalitarians? In the sexist and unsexy four-character 2014 play by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Spillman’s character, Francine Jefferson, is an ambitious…
Composer Mark Adamo knows what you are thinking when you hear the words “Christmas opera” (he can see the sugar plum fairies dancing across your mind). “It’s an opera about Santa Claus as a young boy,” he says with a laugh. “People hear that and they start looking for their…
Before America succumbed to the insane ravings of right-wing media nut-jobbery, the only “war on Christmas” was one based in the notion that the birth of Jesus was exploited for profit by retail businesses. There was too much Christmas in the public square, said solemn theologians and some politicians in…
Imperfect people struggling to free themselves from messy circumstances can make for good drama. But actors fumbling with accents and mumbling lines as they play those imperfect people — as they do in Undermain Theatre’s The Night Alive by Conor McPherson — just make a mess of a pretty good…
The first sound you hear in Stage West’s production of The Heir Apparent is a tremendous fart. That could serve as commentary on the rest of the play. Playwright David Ives’ flatulent adaptation of a fluffy 18th century French comedy is written in rhyming couplets. All of it. Hours of…
Everyone at Plano’s Fun House Theatre and Film is far too young to be doing Arthur Miller’s epic tragedy Death of a Salesman. And yet they succeed in creating one of the best acted, most emotionally lucid productions of this play to hit a local stage in years. Director Susan…
Everyone dies. It’s opera. So no big surprises there. You don’t go to the opera to be shocked by a sudden plot twist. You go to the opera to hear beautiful music sung by immensely talented performers and the Dallas Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s tragic opera, Tosca delivered. The…
Winning a Pulitzer Prize for drama doesn’t mean a play deserves to become a classic. Horton Foote’s The Young Man from Atlanta (Pulitzer 1995) and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1998) dated themselves quickly and were weak choices to start with. In this decade, Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park…
Blink, a sour-then-sweet new play-with-music written and directed by Ochre House regular Kevin Grammer, echoes the theme of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in its lesson about not wasting life fiddling with material possessions. “Shit happens in a blink of an eye,” sings Marti Etheridge in the first of the folky…
They don’t build musicals like Grand Hotel anymore. They don’t build lodging like Berlin’s Grand Hotel anymore either. Even in 1928, when the musical is set, the “guests” are aware that an era of opulence is fading. Characters check in for their last fabulous fling, one more waltz under the…
“Did you come here together,” a woman in a white lab coat asks, pointing between myself and Caroline North, who happens to be the Observer’s copy editor, an arts reporter and my friend. Yes, we answer. “Does she like you more than you like her?” she asks me. I don’t…
