At a brisk 55 minutes, Mike Bartlett’s four-character one-act Bull is just the right length. A minute more and the heightened tension in this piece might cause spontaneous human combustion. It’s that hot, that fierce. And that good. Second Thought Theatre’s production of the brutish British drama, directed by Christie…
Years ago, my love for theater was my entry point into journalism. A poetry student dog paddling in the social tsunami that was Southern Methodist University campus life, I signed on to write a few articles for the student newspaper about theater. Next thing I knew I was taking journalism…
Kinky Boots, now playing at Music Hall at Fair Park, is a size 6 show in a size 13 production. What a minor piece of musical theater, blown up and spread out on a big stage. And what a major disappointment for a show that won Tony Awards in 2013…
This past January, UNT’s improv group, Roll Out the Barrel, nabbed first place at the College Improv Tournament (CIT) Southwest Regional. This marks the second consecutive Southwest Regional win for UNT, with last year’s group, Cell Block Tango, taking home the prize in 2014. Roll Out the Barrel members Cotton…
Count on actor-writer-director-puppeteer and Ochre House regular Justin Locklear to bring his unique brand of weirdness to Doom McCoy and the Death Nugget, his original student-acted production (from an idea by Thomas Riccio) now at UTD’s University Theatre…
For his new play Mississippi Goddamn, Dallas playwright Jonathan Norton does something unexpected and a bit radical in his look back at the 1960s civil rights movement. Instead of simply lionizing Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary who worked to overturn Jim Crow laws and was assassinated on his own…
For musical lovers, the hottest ticket in town is the season subscription for the AT&T Performing Arts Center Broadway Series. These are the people who have brought Book of Mormon to Dallas twice, and continue to book Broadway’s blockbusters. Monday night, the theater announced its 2015/16 season, which doesn’t disappoint…
Ricky, Julian and Bubbles, known together as the infamous Trailer Park Boys, are the best known criminal comedy group in the world. The heavily hairsprayed Ricky, the googly eyed Bubbles and the cocktail clutching Julian get recognized in all four hemispheres, an even more impressive feat for a show that…
If you pitched me a musical theater revue in the end times that weaves obscure show tunes with original music, I’d spit my burnt coffee in your face. But we’re talking about you, not Taylor Mac and Mandy Patinkin. Those two could spill a jar of toothpicks and spend two…
This year Dallas theaters are in love with Shakespeare’s suicidal teenagers. Get ready for half a dozen productions of Romeo and Juliet, including big ones at Shakespeare Dallas and Dallas Theater Center. Plano’s Fun House Theatre and Film is doing a small one, but it’s lovely, with heartfelt performances by…
Cast away all doubts about Gilligan’s Fire Island, the latest comedy bamboozlement (with bamboo) from playwright Jamie Morris, who hasn’t met a classic TV sitcom he didn’t want to turn into an R-rated, cray-cray gay romp. Uptown Players’ laugh-till-you-wheeze production is awash with silliness on the Rose Room stage in…
Dallas actors Wendy Welch and Bob Hess struggle to make laughs happen as they ham their way through the one-act two-hander Sexy Laundry by Canadian playwright Michele Riml, now on in a production directed broadly by Terry Martin in WaterTower Theatre’s studio in Addison. Even these talented pros, so funny…
Putting the audience on couches sounds like a swell idea. Upholstered seating would seem to be a welcome alternative to those stiff green meanies you have to sit on in the main space at the Wyly Theatre. The chairs in the upstairs venues in that building are designed to remind…
To celebrate her 50th anniversary as a choreographer, Twyla Tharp is actually giving us a gift. She’s going back out on a national tour debuting a program of new works, and Dallas is getting the biggest gift all–we get to host the opening night of the tour. On Sept. 18,…
By now, you’ve seen the approximately 400 billboards that have popped up along area thoroughfares: They’re black, with a white horse, and look a lot like advertisements for wine. I was actually fairly certain that Cavalia Odysseo was a nice Riesling until a couple of weeks ago when my daughter…
On his 60th birthday, astronomy professor Ansel Barber sits on his roof, staring through a telescope at the heavens. One by one, his family and friends crawl out a dormer window and bring him down to earth for a night of dark revelry and confrontation in the new musical Soft…
After five years of development, with workshops here and in New York City, Will Power’s musical Stagger Lee finally has its world premiere at Dallas Theater Center. With all that time and effort behind it, Power, who is DTC’s Mellon Foundation-funded playwright-in-residence and the Meadows Prize resident writer at SMU’s…
February’s dance round-up includes a performance from one of the most famous and notable American choreographers, the mounting of a classic, yet contemporary ballet, a performance art series that features dance, a Valentine’s Day event for you dance movie lovers, a concert that celebrates a historic month, a concert that…
The opera will always be operatic. This may seem a redundant, or obvious thing to write, but this can be the paramount struggle for a contemporary audience member. If you didn’t grow up on staples like Madame Butterfly or Carmen — and who really does anymore? — it’s unlikely you’ll…
Back in 2007, the late writer and thinker Christopher Hitchens caught a forklift load of flak for writing a story in Vanity Fair titled simply “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” He reasoned that men were funnier and more clever in comedy than women thanks to a trait guys picked up in…
Dark Circles Contemporary Dance is back with their annual Winter Series, but don’t go to their usual performance location, because they’ve moved. Get your phones out and type this in to Google Maps: Erma Lowe Hall, 3000 S University Drive, Fort Worth. Dark Circles will be premiering two new pieces…
Drinks and sexist attitudes fly in The Explorers Club, the protofeminist farce now playing in a chortle-worthy production at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. Nell Benjamin’s 2013 play is set in 1879 Victorian London in the polished and paneled saloon of a poncy men’s club whose starchy members fancy themselves scientists and…
