Merely by chance, Defiance, a snappy 2006 drama by Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley, and A Soldier’s Play, the 1982 Pulitzer winner by Charles Fuller, are running at the same time at two Dallas theaters, Theatre Three and the new African American Repertory Theater, respectively. The serendipitous scheduling allows playgoers…
Scruffy but beautiful kids singing and dancing their angry, aching hearts out against graffiti-scrawled walls of Manhattan tenements—could be Rent, could be West Side Story. The shows have a lot in common, starting with how brilliantly they update a couple of classics. Rent is based on La Bohème; West Side…
Maybe the blue-hairs in the audience didn’t see it coming. Or, then again, maybe they did—it’s not as if The Who’s Tommy maintains a reputation as a production tailor-made for the older theatergoing crowd. So, surely, the seemingly sedate audience attending last Saturday night’s preview performance of the Dallas Theater…
If it were produced the way its characters intended, The Big Bang would fill a big stage with 312 actors, 6,000 costumes, 302 “prosthetic devices” and a budget somewhere north of $83 million. But in the riotously funny production back for a second go-round at tiny Theatre Too, what we…
In Zanna, Don’t! every kid has two mommies. Or two daddies. Being gay is the norm, and heteros are closeted in the candy-colored, bully-free, over-the-rainbow world invented by writer-composer-lyricist Tim Acito in his 2003 musical. At Uptown Players, director Coy Covington has picked a young, attractive eight-member ensemble to create…
Oh, what a night. A great big Broadway smash called Jersey Boys hits the Music Hall at Fair Park and suddenly everything is all right again. Soaring on tunes about love, youth and yearning, this show flies right to the heart of what musical theater, big or small, should do…
Two plays, one cast of characters. That’s the tricky problem of House and Garden, the simultaneous double bill of Alan Ayckbourn comedies currently running 14 actors gloriously ragged on the two stages at Theatre Three. Upstairs, the House residents, dashing around a rambling pile of bricks in the British countryside,…
With its Romeo and Juliet-inspired plotline about a troubled romance between teenagers from competing cliques, with its soaring love songs, its bold choreography evolving from the natural athleticism of the young cast and its timelessness as a piece of classic American musical theater, it’s a show every caring parent should…
A good production of a good play about a bad production of a bad play is the tricky part of staging Noises Off. Michael Frayn’s three-act inside joke about the delicate nuances of live theater—and what happens when absolutely everything goes awry—is getting decent laughs in a polished, if not…
Hard to tell who gets a bigger kick out of A Year With Frog and Toad—the kiddos in the seats at Dallas Children’s Theater or the big people who bring them. There’s something wonderful about a musical that so successfully entertains the inner child and fascinates the little one gazing…
Which of the following was not in an episode of the 1980s sitcom The Facts of Life: (a) Tootie announces the onset of puberty by yelling “I’m bleeding down there!”; (b) Natalie is nearly date-raped while wearing a Charlie Chaplin costume; (c) Jo catches a teacher doing cocaine; (d) Blair…
The years have been kind to The Oldest Living Graduate. The last play in Preston Jones’ Texas Trilogy holds up even better than the second in the series, Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas did a dandy Lu Ann last season. They have a not-so-dandy Graduate running…
The dog days of Dallas theater are upon us. With A Dog’s Life at Theatre Three, we have the sweetest musical comedy of the season. Up the street at Kitchen Dog Theater is the world premiere of Sick, one of the best new American plays to come this way in…
As soon as Esther, the modest black seamstress at the center of Intimate Apparel, says she’s sewn her life savings into the lining of her quilt, the countdown begins. Somebody’s going to rip that quilt apart and rip Esther off. It’s that kind of story, and she’s the kind of…
Not quite a concert, not quite a bio, not quite much of anything, Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash takes two hours of tunes the rugged “outlaw” country music legend made famous and sends them to musical rehab. Out they come on the other side of the dull-a-tron…
Something funny, sad but a little bit wonderful happens between audience and players in Rain: The Beatles Experience, the musical tribute show winding up a nearly sold-out run at the Music Hall at Fair Park. Not for a second do the four singer-musicians portraying the John, Paul, George and Ringo…
Few shows are so overdone as this one. Critics dread reviewing it again and again. Ardent theatergoers greet its title on a new season brochure with groans of disappointment. Thinking Hello, Dolly! maybe? How about Tuesdays With Morrie? Either or both. They’re always playing somewhere, these two. And like theatrical…
In the second hour of Bent, two men carry rocks, one at a time, from one pile to another. When all of them are stacked, the same stones are hoisted again, placed back in the space so carefully emptied moments before. The repetitive action of men dressed in soiled striped…
A comedy about terminal illness? That’s the ticket at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas’ production of the late Scott McPherson’s 1991 play Marvin’s Room. An absurd, off-kilter tone is established in the opening scene. Middle-aged Bessie (Cindee Mayfield) sits in her doctor’s office, patiently watching her inept physician (Nye Cooper) chase…
By comparison, King Richard III makes Macbeth look like a pussycat. As Shakespeare’s worst/best sociopath, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, romps merrily through one of the Bard’s longest plays, killing everyone who stands, sits or squats between him and the throne of England. In a classical five-act production of Richard III,…
Rooted in his signature bluesy folk-rock and branching out into all sorts of other forms, Greendale has become Neil Young’s musical kudzu. What started in 2003 as an “audio novel,” by Young’s description, already has been performed by Young on CD, DVD and in live concerts with his band Crazy…
All 103-year-olds should look as good as Major Barbara. There are lots of lines but few wrinkles in George Bernard Shaw’s three-act comedy, now running in a production full of smart young actors, and a few wise elders, at Fort Worth’s Stage West. Timely and timeless, the play asks still-relevant…
