Over my five years-plus stint as a theater critic in this town, actor after actor has told me that after the experience of directing themselves in a play, they’d never do it again. (Having seen some of the results of this overburdening of theatrical responsibilities, I have been tempted to…
In a chat between the two acts of the brand-new musical Fat Freddy’s, Rudy Eastman defused the notion that such bawdy, rollicking material is guaranteed to graze on sold-out houses and fatten his company through the rest of a more adventurous season. The artistic director of Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre–who…
Imagine my surprise when I took a seat inside Fort Worth’s Sage & Silo Theatre for a revival of Bent, Martin Sherman’s pioneering if now somewhat quaint 1979 drama about the Nazi persecution of gay men, and watched as a nationally known porn star strolled on-stage. The program insert didn’t…
The last full Dallas production of a Suzan-Lori Parks play–not counting the workshop of her The America Play at Dallas Theater Center’s first Big D Festival of the Unexpected in 1993–was Undermain Theatre’s Southwest premiere of the playwright’s first big splash, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. Back in 1992,…
You have just one more weekend to catch I, Patty Diphusa, International Sex Symbol, the world premiere from Our Endeavors that has, not surprisingly, pulled in audience members beyond the typical Dallas stage crowd. The guy who cuts my hair was kicking himself last week when he had to cancel…
There is a level of technical sophistication in Theatre Three’s current production of the “lost” Stephen Sondheim period musical Saturday Night that makes it seem as though artistic director Jac Alder and his small circle of the T3 faithful have received some special injection of inspiration. The design team of…
I didn’t know much about Marian Anderson, the pioneering contralto who died just eight years ago at the age of 96, when PBS’ News Hour With Jim Lehrer did a short segment several years ago commemorating the 100th anniversary of her birth. I vaguely recall learning more in that 10…
Peruse just a handful of the estimated 190 titles from American playwright Don Nigro’s canon–Dead Men’s Fingers, Boneyard, Lucia Mad, Nightmare With Clocks–and you can’t help but think the 50-year-old writer must possess the complete collection of Goth queen Diamanda Gallas’ musical ravings, if not a few original Edward Gorey…
Speaking of writers and control, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire has stated in interviews that his huge off-Broadway hit Fuddy Meers, currently being produced at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, was one of those scripts that writes itself. He was as surprised at the desperate and disturbed high jinks as was the play’s…
In a bare, wood-floored rehearsal space in the Sammons Center for the Arts, director Mark Farr is advising two actors on the most effective way to rape Christina Vela. They are lean, muscular fellows in black leather pants and gigantic black Frankenstein platform shoes, but a tad timid about the…
Irish playwright Conor McPherson is often paired with his equally successful enfant terrible peer Martin McDonagh (The Beauty Queen of Leenane), but McPherson is slowly overtaking his more reclusive artistic brother by single-handedly reviving the idea of storytelling as theater–or at least bursting the membrane that separates the two forms…
The role of artistic associate at Dallas Theater Center is turning into a briefer and briefer stepping stone on a long career path: Preston Lane follows previous associate Jonathan Moscone’s departure a mere two and a half years after Lane came to work alongside Richard Hamburger. And just as Moscone…
Last Sunday night’s production of The Frequency of Death at Pegasus Theatre drew a healthy crowd when you consider its performance time, and as I cast my snooping journalist’s ears around the place to gather scraps of conversation, I surmised that many of these people were either first-time or very…
The centuries-old global art of shadow puppetry has been given a little light by three estimable Dallas theater talents: director Lisa Lee Schmidt, producer-puppeteer Laurel Hoitsma, and designer-performer Dalton James. Working under a loose, newly founded stage entity known as Xlthlx Productions, the trio has found a unique storybook solution…
Paul Rudnick may be the funniest American playwright who can’t really write–at least, he has major problems with balance, structure, and especially with the delicate intermingling of the serious and the silly. In his widely staged plays I Hate Hamlet, Jeffrey, and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, which receives…
Peruse the online newspapers of major American cities in December, and it’s clear that Langston Hughes’ 1961 Black Nativity is almost as ubiquitous within African-American communities as all the varieties of A Christmas Carol are to so many Anglo playgoers. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Seattle, Fort Worth, and Washington, D.C., have long-existent…
What’s that great whoosh you hear this week as you step into Dallas theaters? It’s the collective breath of artists and audiences finally released after being caught in 12 months of anticipation. Your blue pallor can return to its natural rosiness, people; your gin blossoms will bloom gaily again. The…
I haven’t seen a stranger show in a while–one more packed with diverse agendas, crossed-genre elements, a bipolar alternating need to entertain and uplift–than the musical production currently running in the Stage West half of Allied Theatre Group. Indeed, because I could never quite get a bead on precisely what…
There are few theater types in town more aggressive than Steven Jones, founding producer of Irving’s Lyric Stage. He doles out both promotion of his company and criticism of the perceived deficiencies of other troupes (not to mention the city’s stage punditry) with plainspoken zeal. It can become abrasive if,…
You needn’t be a Catholic scholar to realize that the Virgin of Guadalupe, who first appeared just northwest of Mexico City in 1531, has pretty much surpassed her theological source, The Virgin Mary, in popularity from Texas through Central America. Often referred to as “The Patroness of the Americas,” she…
The Saturday matinee performance of A Christmas Carol at Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District Theater was between half and three quarters full, but when you consider these people had set aside ticket money and prime mall time to soak in Dickens at DTC, there was an odd taciturn air drifting…
We’ve entered that time of the year when those of us who bitch about plastic sentiment and sequin-sewn optimism during the other 11 months now complain that there isn’t enough of it–or rather, that the treacle we’re being served lacks variety. What’s up with us? Even when somebody does try…
