Imitation being the sincerest form of show business, Neil Simon simply imitated one of his own successful formulas with California Suite, the comedy now getting a fine go-round at the Richardson Theatre Centre. The premise–one hotel room, four different stories–already had worked in Plaza Suite, the 1968 Broadway hit set…
Some plays are timely, some plays are timeless. Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild is one of the former. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is the latter. And in productions of each, currently onstage at Kitchen Dog Theater and Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District house, respectively, the reason why timeless works better is…
Quick, quote a famous line from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Don’t worry. Nobody can. Among the Bard’s works, this five-act tragedy is one of the least quotable, and it is performed less often even than Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens. Probably for good reason. This hasn’t stopped the Kitchen Dog Theater…
Big news: Big Daddy isn’t such a bigot after all. That’s one of several important revelations to be found in WaterTower Theatre’s breathtaking new production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where the emphasis shifts away from “Maggie the Cat” and onto the other feuding family members…
Back in 1982, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? played for only five performances at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre before it was shuttered as a critically panned flop. But that wasn’t the end of the show. Over the next 20 years, James Quinn and Alaric Jans’ lighthearted musical about…
Rock Baptist of Houston, setting for David Rambo’s trenchant comedy God’s Man in Texas now at Theatre Three, isn’t so much a place of worship as a stained-glassed theme park. Inside the fictional “largest Baptist church in the world” are restaurants, snack bars, a bowling alley and gym, dinner theater,…
Lie back and think of England. That’s the advice Victorian-era mothers used to whisper to just-married daughters for coping with their wifely duties in the bedroom. It’s also a good tip for anyone burdened with a ticket to The Countess, the new production at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre. This turgid…
Under the harsh glare of an overhead lamp, actress Amanda Denton leans forward over a small table, peers up at an unseen interrogator and asks, “Should I just speak? Is that OK? ‘Cause I got to sort of ease into it, you know?” With dull, stringy hair and eyes as…
For a musical without a real book, Blues in the Night, now at the Dallas Theater Center, tells a powerful story. Of broken romances and forbidden loves. Of late-night, gin-soaked laments for how things might have been. Most of all, of the power of a good woman, sadder but wiser…
For a few minutes toward the end of Cross Stage Right: Die! at the Pegasus Theatre, bumbling detective Harry Hunsacker stops bumbling. Under a hypnotic spell cast by his loyal and much smarter assistant, Nigel Grouse (played by Tim Honnoll), Harry suddenly begins to think he’s the reincarnation of Sherlock…
With the Winter Olympics schussing NBC’s must-watch sitcoms off the prime-time schedule, fans of Friends and Will & Grace might consider heading over to Kitchen Dog Theater for a fix. Rebound and Gagged, a new play by Aaron Ginsburg, sports all the elements of a successful TV situation comedy: attractive,…
The perfect antidote to the epidemic of bad acting and anemic material infecting Dallas stages this winter is Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. A wonderfully acted, bitingly witty paean to Willy the Shake and all things theatrical, the play also aims healthy doses of good-natured ribbing…
Remember when going to the theater felt like an escape from television? Great live theater once offered what so much prime-time TV did not: casts of fascinating characters saying magical, poetic, sometimes shocking lines of dialogue penned by bold young playwrights who wrangled with complex, provocative messages in their work…
Plays about the nobility of disease inevitably bathe the afflicted characters in halos as the most normal, well-adjusted, right-thinking people onstage. It’s everyone else around them who has the problems, imply the playwrights in such dramas. In their canon, a handicap clarifies values, gives the bearer a right to inflict…
Tricky thing, children’s theater. It must capture the attention of little ‘uns whose attention spans are damaged by hours of Gameboys and Power Puff Girls and at the same time entertain grown-ups reluctant to turn off their cell phones for the sake of a cultural outing with the kiddos. African…
Call me conventional, call me coarse, call me crazy, but I prefer my drama, oh, I don’t know, dramatic. Give me a plot with a narrative structure that makes me eager to discover what happens next. Give me characters that are as clever as they are round, who search for…
The laughs are all there in black and white in It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder!, Pegagus Theatre’s stylish, fast-paced chiaroscuro comedy written by and starring Kurt Kleinmann. Twelfth in a series of satirical mysteries featuring lovably bumbling detective Harry Hunsacker (played by Kleinmann), this one gets a…
‘Tis the season to roll out the proverbial cash cows of Christmas–those obligatory feel-good productions, given a tragic twist perhaps or a comic shakedown, but ultimately setting their sights on invigorating the spirit and enriching the box office. After all, what would the holidays be without three different theatrical versions…
Don’t be scared by the title. Christmas at Ground Zero, a new collection of miniplays onstage at the Bath House Cultural Center through December 22, isn’t some hurried-up, played-to-order commentary on the national nightmare that started in September. Only one of the works in this sometimes touching, sometimes trivial production…
Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin offended French readers in the 19th century. Considered scandalous, even pornographic, it told of a repressed young woman who kills her husband to marry a rogue painter. The author’s tale has inspired New York-born composer Tobias Picker to create a more likable Thérèse for a…
Even the most hardened of humbuggers among us has trouble grumbling at full-Grinch when confronted each holiday TV season with the holy trinity of Christmas fables. By these, I mean It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and Scrooge as well as their dramatic permutations and progeny. (No way…
Nick Cristano has a problem, and I’m having trouble figuring out why. As the central character in Theatre Three’s box office hit, Over the River and Through the Woods, Nick is put to a choice. Should he take the promotion his advertising company is offering him and move to Seattle?…
