By 1954, when English playwright-composer Sandy Wilson wrote the book, lyrics, and music for his first and only major stage success, The Boy Friend, a celebration of the 1920s, America and England were experiencing a déjà vu of decades. Folks on both sides of the Atlantic were comparing the ’50s…
The marketers of so-called “race records” — blues, rhythm and blues, and jazz recorded by black artists for black audiences in the first half of the 20th century — often conferred royalty on their headliners in an American society that made them separate and unequal in the most mundane daily…
I recently received a letter signed by “members of the theater community” about a very negative review I gave to Echo Theatre’s production of Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends. Once I recovered from what I assumed to be a shot at my masculinity (these members said I was…
I don’t know if it was apocryphal or not, but the story goes that toward the end of her life, playwright Lillian Hellman was asked after a speaking engagement why, considering that she’d taken up arms against all manner of social injustices throughout her career, she’d never explicitly endorsed the…
I was privileged to spend this past weekend in the company of not three, but five masterful women actors, if you add to Toys in the Attic the Saturday matinee I caught of Grace and Glorie at the Bath House Cultural Center. Everything about advance reviews I’d read of Tom…
If British writer Robert Cedric Sherriff became best known as the co-screenwriter for films like Goodbye Mr. Chips and The Invisible Man, that’s only because his most famous play, Journey’s End, suffers from the same historical neglect as its subject. Plano Repertory Theatre currently offers this drama about life in…
If you happen to be of the opinion that Arthur Penn’s much-praised 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde has not aged well, you will come away from Inside Bonnie Parker, a one-woman show currently playing at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, with the joyous feeling that your dissent has been completely justified…
I don’t visit Joe Dickinson’s Pocket Sandwich Theatre very often, but lest the readers think I’m too snobby to lob a handful of popcorn with the Pocket faithful, let me rush to confirm that I’ve desperately wanted to hurl comestibles at a few shows during the just-ended Dallas theater season…
Actor-writer-director John Turturro’s engaging, episodic, occasionally confusing look at the turn-of-the-century theater in New York, Illuminata, has all the sexual shenanigans of farce without the plot structure to give the accidents and assignations lasting impact. One image that will linger with me, however, makes its first appearance within the opening…
“Is it art or is it pornography? I don’t think it matters what you call it,” said Annie Sprinkle at the close of her sold-out Friday-night performance of The Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real. Given that art, broadly speaking, isn’t illegal, and that the vice cops in attendance at…
As the late, legendary English critic Kenneth Tynan noted in his 1977 profile of the playwright Tom Stoppard, who was only that year enjoying the first decade of his theatrical success after his early smash hit Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard is something of a rare fauna in the…
OK, let’s see a show of hands from everyone who wants to retire the phrase “performance art” from the critical lexicon. Included in the sea of upraised palms are Laurie Anderson, Tim Miller, and two Dallas writer-actors, Dalton James and John S. Davies — enough votes to spur this humble…
In 1997, former Dallas Observer staffer Kaylois Henry wrote a story examining a national phenomenon of African-American theater. Some North Texas and national black stage artists quoted in it took umbrage at the nickname that these brassy, superficial, but successful touring musicals have earned — “the chitlin circuit.” That phrase…
For 27 years now, the reputation of playwright-actor Christopher Durang has grown but not necessarily evolved, if that makes sense. Certainly, his best-known plays are produced by small professional and adventurous community theaters all over the country (he can probably afford a house in the Hamptons on the residuals from…
There’s a lot more about the minefield of adult dating that’s recognizable in Miss-Matched, a world-premiere production of Dallas playwright Robin Armstrong’s script that closes the “All Dallas Playwrights” season of Pegasus Theatre. The empathy factor didn’t always make this scattershot show easier to take — Armstrong’s script needs to…
This week, “Stage” is running a section up the flagpole titled “You’re a Fool if You Missed…” to discover whether readers will salute insults, coercion, and contempt from the theater critic. Rather than exhorting folks to see a great play during the run, we decided to try it backward: browbeating…
Leslie Jordan, the 44-year-old veteran of TV sitcoms and dramas, is probably sick to death of hearing this, but the first thing you might whisper as he strides onto the stage is: “He’s so little.” Actors who make strong impressions often seem larger under the spotlight than they do in…
Playwright Maria Irene Fornes said in an interview that during a post-production talkback she attended at the American Place Theatre for her in-and-out-of-the-chamber-room drama Fefu and Her Friends, she discovered that the men didn’t “get” the play. She wondered whether it had to do with the fact that women are…
And now on to a quieter, sturdier, more focused, if a bit overlong account of one woman’s grappling with the forces of church, literary reputation, professional sexism, and a love for someone not her husband. And it was written by a man, no less. I can’t claim that as any…
It’s been little remarked-upon in the big national magazines that regularly profile him as a movie star, but as Steve Martin’s movie presence has turned limper and limper, his screenplays (especially L.A. Story) and essays for The New Yorker have grown positively tumescent. These works are not quite like the…
A recent piece in The New York Times profiled a bit of missionary work by an American playwright: Wendy Wasserstein took a half-dozen kids from the Bronx to different plays in the city, then went for pizza afterward and asked them what they thought. The piece ostensibly had to do…
The list of tyrants and geniuses, critics and playwrights, politicians and serial killers who receive praise and condemnation in Jonathan Reynolds’ scorching comedy about the scrambled cultural circuits connecting American blacks and whites is too long to mention in this column. Suffice to say Stonewall Jackson’s House, given its second…
