It’s a sunny day in May, and I see Michael Urie’s toothy smile before I’ve even opened the glass door to the City Performance Hall. He’s home from New York City for the weekend, quietly hosting press conferences before heading to Austin for a wedding. The tour of his hit…
If you could jump in your “comedy time machine” (a time machine that can only be used for the purposes of viewing important moments in comedy groups’ histories and therefore can’t be used to go back and…I don’t know… stop Hitler) to view the history of Locked Out Comedy and…
The Dallas Theater Center’s version of Les Miserables has turned quite a few heads for its contemporary take on the classic tale of the French Revolution. Director Liesl Tommy’s politically charged update has earned comparisons to Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. The musical when placed in a modern…
“Picture it, Dallas, Texas.” The wind-ups in Candy Barr’s Last Dance at Theatre Three are something worthy of Sophia Petrillo. And perhaps The Golden Girls is the best foundation for understanding a comedy about aging women, sitting around a kitchen table, laughing over scandalous memories. Despite the popularity of that…
When musicals make the trek from the Great White Way to the silver screen, it’s likely they’ll find a way back to the stage. There is no better publicity than a two-and-a-half-hour blockbuster film. Currently in the Arts District, the Dallas Theater Center mounts a reinterpretation of Les Misérables —…
“Picture it, Dallas, Texas.” The wind-ups in Candy Barr’s Last Dance at Theatre Three are something worthy of Sophia Petrillo. And perhaps The Golden Girls is the best foundation for understanding a comedy about aging women, sitting around a kitchen table, laughing over scandalous memories. Despite the popularity of that…
The Chinese zodiac may indicate that 2014 is the Year of the Horse, but on August 22nd, Year of the Rooster will take the stage at the Wyly Theatre. Upstart Production’s performance of the play inaugurates a six-part series that AT&T Performing Arts Center has dubbed The Elevator Project. The…
When musicals make the trek from the Great White Way to the silver screen, it’s likely they’ll find a way back to the stage. There is no better publicity than a 21/2 hour blockbuster film. Currently in the Arts District, the Dallas Theater Center mounts a reinterpretation of Les Miserables…
She was tiny. She was blonde. Her green eyes looked into your soul and shook it silly. The curves of her hips were pathways to pleasure. If she wiggled her butt, then it was all over. You were hooked. Candy Barr got you. This is the legend of infamous Dallas…
No matter how skilled the storyteller, it can sometimes be hard to tell a story. This task becomes immeasurably more difficult when the teller is expected to fully transform into the character both physically and mentally. To further complicate things, add the fact that your protagonist has a personality that…
Get connected. Go to Mars with some guy named Jon. Reverse roles and play a game. Watch a lizard boy eat a Dorito. Talk about white Russians with Tyler’s mom. All of these things and more will happen at Sundown Collaborative Theatre’s “We’ve Done It Again: A Mixtape,” the group’s…
“60 pulses of storytelling is how we like to describe it,” Artistic Director Dominic D’Andrea says of his One Minute Play Festival (#1MPF), making the fest sound suspiciously like theater for the ADD-addled 21st century. In actuality the #1MPF is anything but. This year Kitchen Dog Theater will play host…
At WaterTower Theatre, time shifts to 1964 in San Francisco. Young Marines head out onto the town before they’re shipped off to a growing war in Southeast Asia. They are looking for a good time, hounding for women. Eddie Birdlace happens upon Rose, a young musician working a late-night shift…
Where did the summer go? It’s been a relatively quiet and cool one this year, and that can only mean one thing. That we’ve all been be resting and waiting for August to hit and for the performance season to start again. Dancers who have been gone all summer training…
Maribeth Monroe is one busy lady. She’s starring in a new dark comedy for HBO called The Brink about a geopolitical whirlwind that could bring about World War III. She’s gearing up to shoot the new season of Workaholics where she plays the perpetually stressed and enraged boss, Alice. Plus,…
A new TV show is trying to bring stand-up comedy back to mainstream television in a way that doesn’t pit eager chuckle monkeys against each other in a battle of meaningless challenges that have nothing to do with comedy. Two names who first took to the mic in Dallas’ burgeoning…
It’s little wonder that no theater until Dallas’ Uptown Players has attempted the bio-musical The Boy from Oz in the decade since it closed its run on Broadway. Hugh Jackman won a Tony in that Broadway production, starring as its flamboyant title character, bisexual Australian singer-songwriter-showman Peter Allen. When Jackman’s…
WWE returned to American Airlines Center this Sunday, and this being a culture blog, we asked Jaime-Paul Falcone to go and send a sketch of what exactly goes at a WWE Live event. Drama, that’s what. Lots of drama, plus merchandising. ACT I Scene 1: Thousands of neon-clad children run…
Shuffle, ball, change. Aaaaaand, dig! Those are the only tap dance words that stuck with me from the beginner adult class I took last fall. Turns out, you need rhythm to tap, and I’ve got zero. But it just looks so darn fun when dancers fly around the stage creating…
Saturday is National Dance Day, another day that you can celebrate through clever Facebook status updates, Instagram hashtags, and throwback photos to your drill team days and those terrible costumes your dance teachers used to make you wear. Or, you could actually get off your butt and dance. Novel idea,…
Like an old actor no longer able to remember his lines, maybe the Festival of Independent Theatres needs to be led gently out of the spotlight for good. The annual FIT fest, as it’s redundantly known, was conceived 16 years ago to give small companies a chance to produce new…
There’s a running joke among critics that the reason they are given aisle seats is that they are statistically more likely to die during a play than another audience member. On the aisle, the dead critic is more easily removed from the theater. The death of the critic is something…
