If comedy is tragedy plus time, then 150 years from now, The Complete History of America (abridged) might be hailed as a comic masterpiece. As it is now, however, the show’s two hours of skits, song parodies and adolescent silliness, written by the same trio of author-actors who condensed all…
As light and crisp as the bubbles in a Buck’s Fizz, the dialogue in Oscar Wilde’s infrequently performed comedy-melodrama Lady Windermere’s Fan stands as some of the playwright’s best. “I don’t know what society’s coming to,” moans a snooty duchess, “the most dreadful people seem to go everywhere. They certainly…
Hello, Godmudda. Hello, fodder for a Pocket Sandwich Theatre comedy whose jokes are so bad one suspects the script was dropped at the front door wrapped around a rotting halibut. Fredo Corleone wasn’t as dumb as The Godmudda–A Mafia Fairy Tale, which tries to blend the Cinderella story with a…
Dallas theater turned out some cruel and freaky work in 2002. In A Clockwork Orange at Quad C Theatre, gangs of cranked-up teens executed beautifully choreographed “ultra-violence.” In Barbette at Kitchen Dog Theater, a Texas-born transvestite committed suicide hanging from a trapeze. In Side Show at Theatre Three, pretty conjoined…
Before writer David Sedaris became America’s favorite chain-smoking, gay ex-patriot raconteur, he worked one memorable holiday season as “Crumpet the elf” at Macy’s on 34th Street in Manhattan. It was a scary-weird job, as Sedaris revealed in a wicked radio essay he performed a decade ago on National Public Radio’s…
Regulars at TITAS Command Performances are well-acquainted with the husband-and-wife dance team of Lucia Lacarra and Cyril Pierre. On two occasions the former San Francisco Ballet principals glided through specially choreographed adagio routines at State Fair Music Hall, inspiring standing ovations. And if Lacarra weren’t such a fine dancer, she…
Cross Noises Off with Waiting for Guffman and you get Inspecting Carol, Daniel Sullivan’s two-act comedy now playing to well-deserved laughs at Plano Repertory Theatre. This backstage farce about a struggling theater company’s disastrous production of the Dickens Christmas classic builds to a loud, slap-happy conclusion and serves as a…
Only the hardest of humbug hearts could resist the high-gloss charm of Dallas Theater Center’s A Christmas Carol, now onstage at the Arts District Theater. It’s a riotous, expensive-looking rendition of the Charles Dickens classic, crowded with pretty dancing wenches and adorable urchins wassailing around fir trees under garlands of…
Ethelred the Unready is ready for his close-up. Shakespeare got a lot of mileage out of the feuds and foibles of many crowned heads in British history, mainly your sequentially numbered Richards and Henrys. But until Silence, the comedy by Brit playwright Moira Buffini that’s been held over for a…
A good deal of rogering goes on in Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill’s dark farce about sexual identity that’s now getting a first-class production by Echo Theatre at the Bath House Cultural Center. Rogering is British slang for you-know-what. Boffing. Having it off. All that nahsty nudge-wink, nudge-wink bedroom nonsense. In…
A lousy daddy, that King Lear. A real crumb bum. Through five long acts of Shakespeare’s finest play, Lear nastily foments family squabbles, property disputes, madness, war, murder and suicide. He destroys his entire family and leaves his kingdom in ruins. Only at the end of his ego-driven life does…
Sometime in the not too distant future, human actors vanish from TV. Their replacements? “Actoids,” programmable talking dolls designed to populate midday soap operas and by-the-numbers nighttime cop dramas without the need for contracts, union wages, lunch breaks or even scripts. Just punch a button, yell “Action!” and their electronic…
Think of the Sycamore family as the Munsters. The clan at the center of the effervescent production of You Can’t Take It With You now onstage at the WaterTower Theatre is a kooky bunch of lovable misfits occupying a spooky old two-story in Morningside Heights. With its stuffed animal heads…
When real magic happens on a stage, as it does in Quad C Theatre’s current production of A Clockwork Orange, an audience may undergo something akin to alchemy. We sit down as our normal, numbed-out selves, a little work-weary, or logy from the bowl of teriyaki grabbed before curtain time…
The few pieces of furniture onstage in a couple of new productions–The Good Thief at Kitchen Dog Theater and Love Letters at the Stone Cottage in Addison–wouldn’t crowd a corner of the average den. Couple of chairs. Couple of tables. Glass of water. Glass of beer. The minimalism is intentional…
Many a marriage must feel exactly like Winnie’s predicament in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, now being forcefully and hilariously performed at Kitchen Dog Theater. There good wife Winnie (played by Shelley Tharp-Payton) stands in the first act, buried up to her waist in a mound of earth. Husband Willie (David…
Start with Steinbeck: “They had walked in single file down the path, and even in the open one stayed behind the other…The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features…Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large,…
After those first few piano notes sound as the lights come up on the panicked dancers of A Chorus Line, the audience should get hit with a full-on assault on the eardrums. As written, the opening song, “I Hope I Get It,” is a big blast of noise combining music,…
When a show begins with a funeral, watch out. A Class Act, a musical bio about troubled Broadway composer-lyricist Ed Kleban (now playing at Theatre Three), starts and ends at a fictional memorial service for Kleban at the Shubert Theatre in 1987 (his real memorial that year took place in…
Hip-hooray and bushels of ballyhoo for the wide-open exuberance of 42nd Street, a musical so slap-happy with tapping and dripping with schmaltz, you could get giddy from it. The spectacular touring production now at the Music Hall at Fair Park is naughty, gaudy, bawdy and brimming with talent. The chorines…
At a recent performance by the new ChelseaPark Productions troupe at the Trinity River Arts Center, the lights came up for intermission between two one-acts and half a dozen patrons headed for their cars. That effectively diminished the audience by a third. It’s a tough time to get a new…
The danger in writing a witty contemporary play filled with topical references and satirical jabs at public figures is that, over time, the references grow whiskers and the public figures fade into obscurity. That’s what’s happened with George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1939 comedy The Man Who Came to…
