“The American theater’s in a shitload of trouble,” the “stage manager” says to the audience in Anton in Show Business, Jane Martin’s roundhouse punch at the absurdity of the acting profession. That may be true, but the funny thing is, by choosing this dark, smart satire as its season opener,…
You’ll come for the title. You’ll stay for 70 minutes. And you’ll go home thinking of punch lines infinitely funnier than the ones coming from the stage in Porn for Puritans, the comedy revue now playing in the little theater at The MAC. Written and performed by Leigh Tomlinson and…
Many is the promising playwright who cuts his teeth on a one-act play or at least attempts one during those fondly remembered starvation years. Likely, some have three or four one-acts or short plays sitting around in some dusty trunk waiting to be brushed off after the author gets discovered…
Maybe it’s a mistake bringing my wife and son to the theater, hoping Sandy Duncan can pull off the part of Anna Leonowens in Dallas Summer Musicals’ production of The King and I. Yes, Duncan is a Tony Award-winning actress, with a Broadway résumé as solid as it is varied…
Sometimes a few orders of well-made appetizers can be as satisfying as a four-course meal. So it is with The Dining Room, now playing at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas. A.R. Gurney’s two-act play offers nibbles of story, several tasty characters and enough good lines to chew on to forgive the…
The first words the audience hears in the Richardson Theatre Centre production of the thriller Wait Until Dark come from President Gerald R. Ford, grimly granting Richard M. Nixon a full pardon for involvement in Watergate crimes. It’s a brief audio flashback to 1974, a dark period in American history,…
Hardly anyone writes love letters anymore. Sigh. Real billets-doux, the kind penned in inky swirls on creamy paper, have given way to the crude shorthand of instant messages and the tinny squawk of disembodied voicemail. Try wrapping a satin ribbon around those. Back in the dark ages, B.AOL., as it…
Questions about art, race, ethics and language spark passionate arguments in the provocative new play Permanent Collection, currently the main-stage offering at Kitchen Dog Theater’s sixth annual New Works Festival. In an elegantly designed and smartly acted production directed by Dan Day, the Thomas Gibbons drama challenges its characters (and…
Cocktail hour extends to nearly three in WaterTower Theatre’s bouncy, boozy production of Company. The Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical finds a group of five upscale married couples gathering for the 35th birthday of bachelor Bobby (Donald Fowler), a 1970s Manhattan playboy with an aversion to settling down. Everybody sings, and…
It’s hard not to like a show that raffles off chess pies at intermission. Pump Boys and Dinettes, now playing at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, is its own big sticky slice of American pie. A Broadway hit with its original cast of songwriter-performers in the early 1980s, the revue featuring…
Marie Jones’ 1999 Irish comedy Stones in His Pockets, the final production of Theatre Three’s current subscription season, turns out to be this theater’s best in many a moon. About time, too. This company has limped through the past year with a lineup of plays that were ill-chosen (Arsenic and…
Truth is, from the female perspective, all men are fixer-uppers. There’s always at least one thing he does wrong that, were he to fix it according to our instructions, he’d be just about perfect. Like that guy who wears tasseled loafers with shorts. A simple repair. Or the otherwise lovely…
“It’s a maaaaaarvelous script,” says radiant screen queen Mary Dale of her role as Lady Godiva in a big-budget bio-pic set in the 11th century. “Really illuminates those troubled times. And we have some terrific musical numbers.” Dale, sleeker than Lana Turner, sweeter than Doris Day, is playwright Charles Busch’s…
A man and woman sit in a living room. She’s a pretty blonde. He’s well-dressed but mushy around the midsection. Good paintings hang on the wall behind them. The soft beige leather sofa and two pale chairs positioned just so make a visual statement about the couple’s social status (high)…
Heavier almost than the mood-setting smoke hanging over the Kalita Humphreys stage for the Fats Waller musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ is the sense of irony that the Dallas Theater Center would choose this show as the follow-up to Topdog/Underdog. Back in March, the theater staged a top-notch production of Suzan-Lori Parks’…
The actors in Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes or The Green Pill, now playing at The MAC, are made up to look like human marionettes. They move with deliberate, jerky gestures, as if their limbs are manipulated by invisible strings. Their faces are painted chalky white, cheeks circled with bright…
When Sheran Goodspeed-Keyton sings, the little hairs on the backs of your wrists start to quiver. Her magnificent voice can split the heavens and move an audience to tears. In Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues, now onstage at Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre, her performance in the starring role seems…
“Do you have any idea what it’s like being English?” John Cleese asked in A Fish Called Wanda. “Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing…We’re all terrified of embarrassment.” Understanding that particularly English phobia regarding public humiliation helps explain why…
Like many a drinking binge, James McLure’s evening of companion comedies Lone Star and Laundry and Bourbon starts slowly, picks up momentum and ends with a boisterous, boozy crescendo. Now onstage in a cracking production directed by Cynthia Hestand at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the pair of related one-acts takes…
The Devil is in the details in plays sharing the three stages at WaterTower Theatre’s annual Out of the Loop Festival in Addison. He’s also a big influence on some of the plots. Take Baptized to the Bone, a strange, uneven Southern gothic farce written by Dave Johnson, directed by…
When a playwright writes a loaded gun into the first act, Anton Chekhov noted, it had better be fired by the fourth. Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ 2002 Pulitzer-winning drama now onstage at the Dallas Theater Center, has two acts, two characters and one gun. Fewer than five minutes of act one…
In many productions of Shanghai Moon, the Charles Busch comedy now playing at Pocket Sandwich Theatre, the leading character, Lady Sylvia Allington, is played by a man. Busch played the part himself in a successful off-Broadway revival not long ago. At the Pocket, a lady, Trista Wyly, plays the Lady,…
