Months of therapy are all it will take to come to grips with Tracy Letts’ dark and funny Bug, onstage now in its area premiere at Kitchen Dog Theater. It’s that disturbing, that real. And as a piece of live theater, that much of a visceral shock to the system…
The real test of any play written as a star vehicle is how it works when performed by lesser mortals. Two productions that have just opened–Theatre Britain’s Lettice & Lovage and Theatre Three’s The Imaginary Invalid–feature so-so scripts that could benefit from more commanding personalities in the leading roles. Peter…
Home to many a forgettable, popcorn-tossing, low-comedy melodrama, Pocket Sandwich Theatre now owns bragging rights to something pretty cool: the premiere of the first professional production written and directed by Brent Black. At 21, the kid from Irving is still a year away from his drama degree at the University…
The first person we see in Contemporary Theatre of Dallas’ explosively funny production of Beth Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest is Carnelle, the leading character played by Jennifer Knight, practicing her patriotic tap routine for a Fourth of July beauty and talent pageant she desperately wants to win. “Boom!” she…
How do you make a dead baby float? Two scoops ice cream, two scoops dead baby. Old joke. Terrible joke. But there it is, coming out of the mouth of Ben Marcus, the expectant father at the center of Little Footsteps, now onstage at the Black Box Theatre at the…
If only Zach could see Southern Baptist Sissies, now running at Uptown Players. All summer dozens of online blogs have bounced stories and comments back and forth about Zach, a 16-year-old Tennessee boy whose own Web journal details his fears of being dispatched by his parents to Love in Action,…
The hot tomato juicing up the new comedy Pico de Gallo: The Return of the Queen is one “Chula Cholula,” a spicy little slice of womanhood who just happens to be played by a man, Oscar Contreras. Chula is a favorite recurring character in shows written and performed by the…
They’re naked and wet at Theatre Three, where the in-the-round stage becomes a burbling swimming pool for the production of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. Based on myths set down by Ovid in A.D. 1, the play revisits the stories of Phaeton, Halcyon, Poseidon, Orpheus, Midas and other figures invented by the…
What must go on offstage at Disney’s On the Record? Eight singers and nine musicians populate this sickeningly cheerful revue of more than 60 songs plucked from 75 years of movies from the mouse factory. Now playing at the Music Hall at Fair Park, the touring production already has crisscrossed…
If she weren’t so stinkin’ crazy, Annie Wilkes would be a writer’s best friend. In Misery, the highly enjoyable stage play of the Stephen King novel now eliciting laughs and screams at Richardson Theatre Centre, Annie (played with slow-building furor by Rachael Lindley) cajoles and coddles the author whose books…
Mel Brooks’ The Producers is the gift that keeps on giving. First there’s the original 1968 film, a nearly perfect 88 minutes of comedy. Its two leads, Zero Mostel, as slimy Broadway impresario Max Bialystock, and Gene Wilder, as wobbly-kneed accountant Leo Bloom, never did better work. It’s not a…
Two women exist on strangely parallel planes in Lisa Loomer’s play Living Out, now onstage in an exciting and powerfully acted regional premiere at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. They are both working mothers with young children. Both have headstrong husbands who’d prefer that their wives stay home to be full-time mommies…
Neil Simon’s 31st play, The Dinner Party, now at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, skips the meal and serves up a big fat cream puff. It looks delicious, but bite in and there’s just the slightest hint of filling inside an empty shell. This two-act exercise is an airy and utterly…
Pick A Number as the best new short play about a provocative subject. The writing sends off sparks of genius, the plot twists shock. More happens in the scant 65 minutes of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s one-act gem, now onstage in a Southwest premiere at Undermain Theatre, than other plays…
Muscular young men rolling around on each other in skintight unitards sounds like a scene from one of the Uptown Players’ sellout shows. But the intensely though probably unintentionally (let’s hope) homoerotic drama The Wrestling Season is onstage at Dallas Children’s Theater, which is presenting Laurie Brooks’ gay-themed one-act as…
Mothers really take it in the aprons this week. In two new productions–the regional premiere of campy comedy Mambo Italiano at the Uptown Players and Quad C’s poignant The Beauty Queen of Leenane–they remember Mama not with flowers but with bouquets of blame. Mambo dances the tarantella on its two…
VaVa Veronica blows a mean saxophone. But not with her mouth. As one of a handful of ragged “disappointment players,” Veronica, a would-be strip woman played by voluptuous Lydia Mackay, bumps and grinds and warms up her mouthpiece behind the stage door of an old Dallas vaudeville palace, waiting to…
Andrea Dworkin is dead. Not a lot of laughs, Ms. Dworkin. She was the most radical of her generation of radical feminists. In lectures, articles and books–her first in the 1970s was titled Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality–Dworkin defined men as little more than moral cretins. She equated…
Professor Henry Higgins, the bossy, tweedy phonetics expert in My Fair Lady, boasts that he can tell any man’s place of birth and social class from listening to his accent. Tortured vowels? Low-born Cockney. Nasal consonants? Eton and Oxford. So what might the good professor make of the many attempts…
Something hideous hangs nailed to the door of the farmhouse in Kitchen Dog Theater’s sublimely terrifying production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. Old sock? Clump of moss? Hair? Oh, no… it couldn’t be what I think it is. They wouldn’t use that. Oh, yes, they would. Brrrrr. There are nasty…
On the face of actress Lynn Blackburn are all the reasons you need to see Hay Fever, Theatre Britain’s production now running–no, galloping at full gait–on the stage at Trinity River Arts Center. First, there’s Blackburn’s nose, a proud little thing twitching pertly like Samantha Stevens’ or turning down slightly…
The Cherry Torture, critics often call it. And for good reasons. Anton Chekhov’s final play babbles on and on for four acts of increasingly tedious arrivals and departures by more than a dozen oddball characters. Actors enter with great flourish to announce that they must be going, and then they…
