Everyone watches television, but hardly anyone can tell you who invented it. Lightbulb? Edison. Telephone? Bell. TV? Huh? You’ll know a lot more after you see The Farnsworth Invention, a play by Aaron Sorkin getting its Dallas debut at Theatre Three. Sorkin, who won an Oscar for The Social Network,…
What writer Aaron Sorkin did with the founding of Facebook for his Oscar-winning screenplay The Social Network, he does with similar flourishes in his play about the fathers of television, The Farnsworth Invention. Getting its Dallas debut in an exceptionally zippy production at Theatre Three, the play is an explosive…
Congratulations Michael Martinez! You get to see One Man Lord of the Rings on Sunday, compliments of WaterTower Theatre’s Loop Festival. The festival kicks off tomorrow and tickets are still available for some of Mr. Ross’ performances; get them here. For a breakdown of other cool Loop plays, check this…
I was starting to feel like Out of the Loop Fringe Festival would never arrive. The ten day, highly experimental outsider theater festival has been sitting on the timeline’s horizon; I nearly constructed an advent calendar to make the waiting more bearable. Starting tomorrow, theater-goers will pour into WaterTower’s multiple…
Here’s how small the Ochre House theater is: When the actors in Mean, Matthew Posey’s new musical about Charlie Manson, enter and exit, they use the front door of the place. A whoosh of wind comes in off the sidewalk on Exposition Avenue as actors two-step through the audience in…
Casting news for local plays isn’t usually headline-worthy. Unless, that is, the artistic director from one major theater is cast as an actor in a much-anticipated production at another major theater. That’s the inside-baseball scoop about WaterTower Theatre honcho Terry Martin showing up as the lead in Dallas Theater Center’s…
The kids in the sweet, funny new play The Chicken Who Wasn’t Chicken, running in Plano through Sunday, February 26, don’t know how lucky they are. The script is a new one from Matt Lyle, a former Dallas writer and actor who went on to Second City’s writing program in…
The guys hanging out together in Steven Walters’ get-down funny play Pluck the Day are old high school buds, now in their 30s and starting to go to seed. Duck, the former gridiron star (played with lovable stupidity by Clay Yocum), and brainy Bill (Chris LaBove) are worried about their…
If the cast of Chelsea Lately were to burn their bras, it would not be an act of defiance so much as a drunken scheme, and it certainly wouldn’t take place at a political forum. If Sarah, Whitney, Heather and Chelsea spark up their boulder holders it’s in order to…
“A long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy.” Charles Manson said that. If anybody’s qualified to weigh in on crazy, it’s Charlie Manson. He’s 77 now, in his 42nd year of a life sentence. In the Ochre House theater’s chilling, strangely thrilling new show Mean, set in…
Tennessee Williams had a weird thing about hotels, beaches and death. In his play The Night of the Iguana, currently onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the rundown Costa Verde beach resort in Mexico acts as the holiday getaway for the Grim Reaper. Every guest who checks in is on…
In his new solo show Beyond Words, Bill Bowers combines mime, music and text to tell stories from his life growing up in Montana. He also shares some stories from other lives, including one about a small-town boy from Sherwood Anderson’s short fiction collection Winesburg, Ohio. Beyond Words is one…
Sometimes a play is worth seeing for the words the actors are saying. Sometimes it’s for the actors saying the words. See Collapse, a new play by Allison Moore at Kitchen Dog Theater, for the red hot performance by actor Michael Federico, the closest Dallas theater has to a Paul…
While I had a great time at Medieval Times celebrating my 13th birthday more than 20 years ago, and again celebrating my son’s 10th last weekend, I now understand why my parents took me there exactly once as a child. There was a specific moment that drove home the realization…
A few good men were involved in the invention of television. That’s the subject of the play The Farnsworth Invention, written by Oscar and Emmy winner Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, The Social Network, Moneyball) and opening tonight at 7:30 p.m. in previews at Theatre Three, where it will run through…
A couple weeks ago, I’d expressed some anxiety about attending JourneyDance with Katie Toohil at SYNC Yoga and Wellbeing in Oak Cliff. Dancing, huh? My own my mom has likened my moves to Elaine from Seinfeld; but, they might be described more accurately as Woody Allen: the Broadway Musical. Further…
A lot of drinking and heavy thinking can happen on a hot day on a veranda. Two good shows running on Dallas stages right now — The Night of the Iguana at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas and Pluck the Day at Second Thought Theatre — take place on big porches,…
It may never win a Tony but Bring It On: The Musical deserves a solid gold spirit stick for mixing the dynamic moves of those cheerleading competitions on ESPN with the happy-peppy singing and dancing by the kids on Glee. The national tour of the show, only loosely based on…
You know Mindy Kaling as Kelly Kapoor on six seasons of the NBC comedy The Office. But did you also know that Kaling won a whole bunch of awards portraying Ben Affleck? She did, co-starring with Brenda Withers off-Broadway in the play the two women wrote, the comedy Matt &…
One Man Lord of the Rings, miming class, sketch comedy and so many plays that you’ll have to bring an airplane pillow for your tush, Out of the Loop Fringe Fest promises to pack beaucoups of non-traditional theater into its ten-day run from March 1 through the 11th. I know…
Five years ago, actress Diana Sheehan had what she describes as “the most euphoric day of my life.” Both of her young children were in school all day at last and, for the first time in years, Sheehan found she was free to do whatever she wanted. “I danced for…
As small, intense, pull-your-hair-out comedies, the new plays Coyote and Collapse have a lot in common. Coyote, playing a few more performances at Nouveau 47’s tiny theater at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park, puts us out in the Arizona desert with a couple of those trigger-happy “Minutemen” militia guys…
