The charming, old Oak Lawn house that serves as the home of Broken Gears Project Theater lends intimacy to Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s naturalistic psychological tragedy, Creditors. It translates and elevates the domestic, allowing the audience to catch every exquisite nuance elicited by director René Moreno. The acting space is dominated by light grays and whites, evoking a sun dappled, whitewashed European beach resort with soft, fluffy clouds, and wicker furniture (set design and properties by Elias Taylorson and René Moreno, scenic painting by Kaori Imai). Lilting beach sounds (Alex Worthington) in the background complete the seaside tableau. All this outward beauty lends all the more contrast to the painful and complicated interior mess in the intertwined lives of the three characters.

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On dfw.com, Punch Shaw talks to the playmakers behind Circle Theatre’s Boeing-Boeing about what makes good comedy work:

“Comedy has to run on a clock and be very rigid. But it has to look really easy,” says Robin Armstrong, who is directing the show, which opens Circle Theatre’s 30th season. “It needs to look like Fred Astaire dancing. Everybody should go, ‘Oh, I could do that.’ But, of course, very few people can.”

Photo by Glen E. Ellman

Little Wanda Jackson, a giant in American music, played to a packed Kessler Theater Saturday, and as Mario Tarradell writes, she brought it:

Jackson , performing for a standing-room-only crowd, charmed with her sharp wit, warm personality and endearing stories about the happenstance road to becoming the Queen of Rockabilly. Encouraged by one-time boyfriend Elvis Presley, Jackson blazed a trail for “girl singers” with her strength, sex appeal and raw talent.The Oklahoma sweetheart initially wanted to sing country, but Elvis discovered her rock ‘n’ roll core. Backed by Dallas’ five-man hard country band the King Bucks, Jackson traced through rockabilly, country, gospel and three tunes from her acclaimed new CD, The Party Ain’t Over , produced by Jack White.

Jackson never backed down, spending about 90 minutes onstage and belting every tune while still recovering from laryngitis. She had her remedy handy — sips of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Photo via wikicommons.

The King’s Speech won big at last night’s Oscars, so, Gerard Baker asks in the Wall Street Journal, what does that choice tell us about the awards?

It surely appealed perfectly to the Academy’s self-image as the voice of the disadvantaged (even kings can be disadvantaged, apparently). But it also hit all Oscar’s other key messaging points–grand themes of human endeavour, struggles between good and evil.

In sum, it was a perfect Oscar story: Unlikely Hero Overcomes Flaw to Achieve Greatness. And not just any Hero or any Greatness. A king, no less, whose triumph over adversity was critical in defeating the greatest tyranny the world has ever seen.

Marc Blitzstein’s glorious and problematic opera Regina, originally produced on Broadway in 1949, took the stage at Murchison Performing Arts Center in Denton Friday night in a largely successful and unfailingly fascinating production by the UNT Opera.

Blitzstein based the opera on Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, a drama of greed and dysfunction in an upwardly mobile family in Alabama in the early twentieth century. Two years after its premiere on Broadway in 1939, with Tallulah Bankhead in the principal role of Regina Giddens, Hellman’s play became a cinematic star vehicle for Bette Davis, who obliterated everyone else on the screen with an elegantly cruel rendition of the role that had belonged to Bankhead on Broadway.

Blitzstein, famously left-wing in his politics and not afraid to present his political views into his works for the musical stage, managed to maintain Hellman’s vividly defined characters and, at the same time, introduce new layers of political and sociological exploration. The result is a masterpiece that, while keeping any audience’s attention, constantly disturbs and, at times, confuses with a grand hodgepodge of styles ranging from traditional spiritual to blues to lyrical neo-romanticism to dissonant mid-twentieth-century modernism. At times, Regina is daringly experimental and defiant of operatic tradition—as when, for instance, in the first act, the cast sings its stage directions. And at times it’s assertively show-bizzy—there are scenes that would do credit to Bollywood at its most bizarre. And, at times, styles and concepts seem to collide: a moment that seems almost severely realistic can turn, suddenly, into pure opera.

The Lyric Theater of the Murchison Center proved, once again, to be an ideal setting for innovative, intimate opera production, with a realistic cutaway set dominated by a grand staircase. (With, however, one minor drawback, in that a very few of the scenes were performed on a runway that was partially obscured for much of the audience.) Conductor Stephen Dubberly successfully marshaled the constantly shifting musical forces and styles, and stage director Paula Homer wisely chose to play with and even emphasize the swings of mood and style inherent in Blitzstein’s score. Homer, incidentally, handled the racial subtext sensitively and with admirable style; although, as with any work dealing with race written in the United States in the middle twentieth century, there is inherent stereotyping, Homer enhanced Blitzstein’s deliberate mixture of musical styles by introducing some convincing visual interaction between the character of Alexandra, the white heiress, and the African-American servants, in a subtle defiance of the historical norms.

Among the cast for Friday night’s performance, Maria Bellanca sang beautifully in the title role while acting the part in an appropriately garish, emotionally insecure, and almost trashy sub-nouveau riche manner. We could hate her a little more than we hate the Bette Davis version of Regina, but we could also more readily understand her origins and sympathize with her considerably as a product of the culture around her. Ponder Randy Price Gilliland delivered a resonant and commanding performance as Ben Hubbard, and Kylie Toomer was continually captivating, sensitive, and vocally magnificent as the alcoholic aristocrat Birdie. Avis Stroud as Addie and Kathryn Supina as Alexandra Giddens both delivered beautifully acted and sung performances, as did Darry Hearon in a show-stealing performance as the musical field hand named Jazz.

Although Regina has yet to enter the operatic canon—performances are sporadic and rare, even in an era that appreciates eclecticism—the UNT production proves that it’s a piece very much worth the effort. The third act, indeed, pays off hugely, both in a lyrical moment in which four of the more likeable characters join in at least realizing simple human values, and, moments later, when Regina triumphs over her sibling adversaries and, at the same instant, realizes the tragedy of her own situation. Here, Blitzstein, through the constantly risky brewing of disparate musical styles, achieves a moment in which the political and the personal come together profoundly.

Image: Marc Blitzstein via tsutpen.

FRIDAY

Wild//Tribe/Spazm 151/Wiccans/Dead Line/Occult Detective Club (Rubber Gloves): The last time I spent an afternoon espousing the strong independent ethic and hard work ideals of Occult Detective Club, they canceled their appearance.  So I’m not going to say much this time, other than this is the tour kickoff for the tour that was previously mentioned.  I will add that when a song from their new record was selected as a free track on the widely popular and long-running tech and culture site Boing Boing, the group was unimpressed and simply re-posted the piece with a curt “WTF is Boing Boing?”  How punk is that?

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What I love about a petite venue like The Loft is its ability to really tune into the “woo spectrum.”

There’s the “individual woo.” This woo is achieved by young artists like last night’s first opener, The Netherfriends. Shawn Rosenblatt only had time for a few songs but magic was made with his makeshift band consisting of a portable, electric drum set and miniature, green keyboard. He also worked the mountain man beard very well for man of such small frame. After repeatedly gyrating around stage, flaying his excited skinny arms, he received a group of individual audience woo’s and loved it.

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Dallas theater company Upstart Productions launches its Upstart Cinema series this evening with a screening of Frank Mosley’s Hold. I asked Upstart artistic director Josh Glover about the series and what they hope to start up with the new film-theater collaboration.

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Yesterday, the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation announced a handful of new donations to their capital campaign totalling, oh, $9 million, which brings the fundraising effort within $17 million of completing its goal. So my question: does that remaining $17 million include funds required to install the art planned for the park — you know, the bit that will make it attractive like Chicago’s Millenium Park (Woodall’s oft-cited model)? Or does the money needed for the art have to be raised in addition to that remaining $17 million? Here’s what a park spokesperson I asked said:

The art piece is separate from the $17 million goal. It will happen, and they are putting a process together to review how to select the art. It could happen between now and 2012, it might happen after the park is open. It’s sort of dependent on a donor being passionate about naming the iconic art feature.

Fair enough (though I hope the artist, not the donor gets to name the piece). So after the $17 million is raised, there will need to be additional funds raised to fund the art, which is unfortunate, and not because we all love us some art in parks. Rather, it is because it means the Woodall Rodgers Park’s overall design philosophy is quite different than Millenium Park’s. As someone who was close to the Millenium Park planning and development once told me, Chicago’s park was initially designed with the art installations in mind, and it was the art — the now legendary Plensa and Kapoor installations (the fountain and the bean) — that drove the formation of the rest of the park. The park was imagined “art-first” because the art created a context for the park’s funtionality, it was the spatial engine. Woodall is taking a much more conventional approach — the art is an “add-on,” a “feature.” It is something you “do” in the park not the thing that “is” the park. The Woodall Rodgers Park is still a very promising project, and the comparison with Millenium is not entierly fair. Millenium is a completely exceptional park. It is, in many ways, the park of the 21st century city. Woodall may still be a very good park, but we should start to hold our city boosters to a standard of exceptionality. And in that sense, this is a lost opportunity.

Park designed by the Office of James Burnett, rendering by Michael McCann.

If you’ve checked out the delightful finalists in the Oscar’s short film competition (and you should), you will remember the off-beat comedy “God of Love.” Turns out one of the film’s stars, Marian Brock, graduated in 2005 from the University of North Texas. The school’s newspaper, The North Texan, has a profile.

Image: Luke Matheny and Marian Brock in “God of Love.”