If you remember being a fan of E.B. White’s classic, Charlotte’s Web then you need to head over to Casa Mañana to relive the glory days of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and stories of spiders who spin calligraphy webs in order to save their best friend from the slaughterhouse (even if that friend is a little piggish).

Luckily, we’ve got a family four-pack of tickets to give away for this Friday’s production opening at 7:00 p.m. Use your kids as an excuse ..read more

It’s time for another giveaway, and we’ve plucked a good one for you today: two tickets to this weekend’s opening of Pluck the Day, the re-vamped theatrical brainchild of Dallas playwright and Dallas Theater Center company member Steven Walters at Second Thought Theatre. “Pluck” tells the story of three friends held captive by addiction, fear and apathy—also beer, peyote and a girl named April—that manages to be funny and tragic all at once. How, you ask? Co-Artistic Directors Steven Walters and Chris ..read more

Ah, February. Romance and comedy are in the air.  Fortunate for us that the romcoms of the 18th century are timeless treasures waiting for a unique little theater to reintroduce them.  Mark-Brian Sonna Productions presents their charming take on Pierre Mariveaux’s The Game of Love and Chance.

For seven years, MBS’ mission has been to bring “either brand new works for the stage, world premiere translations of classic works, or adaptations of classic works.”  This mission allows the company to run ..read more

One-actor shows can be dicey propositions under the best of circumstances.  Their seeming lack of variety, personalities, and action can put off jaded modern audiences with short attention spans.  However, when the right material in the right venue meets a transcendent performer it becomes a miracle of solo magic.  Jubilee Theatre provides just the right alchemy in their resplendent production of Charlayne Woodard’s Pretty Fire.

This is actor and playwright Woodard’s (better known for her film and television roles) first of ..read more

The 16 performance run of the musical Les Misérables at the Winspear Opera House took in a whooping $3.1 million, topping the $2.3 million gross record that Mamma Mia! set back in 2006. Dallas was also the top-grossing date for the Les Misérables tour, beating out Denver by $300,000.

With Les Misérables, the AT&T Performing Arts Center has a trifecta of local revenue records, scoring the highest grossing one-man show and play (non-musical) in Dallas history, with Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays and August: Osage County respectively.

Here’s a ..read more

Texas has two heroes: football and women. We’re bringing you both today in this Tuesday’s giveaway: Stage West’s The Sports Page. Dallas playwright and former sports writer Larry Herold takes us back to 1966 when women were making their way into media and the Dallas Cowboys still had hope. We have a pair of tickets to give away, to get your hands on them all you have to do is answer this question in the firm below: Who has the ..read more

Take equal parts Edgar Allan Poe, and H.G. Wells, a dash of Frankenstein, and throw in some popcorn (literally), and you have a recipe for a “super shocker” of a play, the electrifying concoction that is Pocket Sandwich Theatre’s production of Dennis G.W. Millegan’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. Millegan, who also directs, uses Poe’s short story with the same title (widely considered the world’s first detective story) and Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau as his jumping off points to ..read more

Who knew that tucked away in a little building in the historic Ft. Worth Public Market Complex one could see obscure plays from a widely studied, yet rarely performed playwright done with passion and skill? Now I know, and I am here to spread the word about the amazing work Pantagleize Theatre Company is doing, particularly with their production of Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken.

Founding Director Violet O’Valle describes Pantagleize (from the Greek meaning “always” and “shining”) as the ..read more

With Giant, composer Michael John LaChiusa pays homage to our great state, the glory days of cattle, and the false promise of big oil. The musical is ambitious and long, densely packed with historical explanation and no small amount of pride. The same cliché that’s true for Texas holds some merit here as well: bigger does not always mean better. And occasionally our size and pride together acts like a security blanket, concealing the fear that we’re all just a bunch ..read more

Bring It On inspired multiple sequels including: Again, All or Nothing, and my personal favorite “it’s already been broughten,” from Not Another Teen Movie. And today we’re bringing it to you because Dallas Summer Musicals presents Bring It On: The Musical at Fair Park this February. To get your hands on them all you have to do is answer the question in the form below: This production includes many Tony Award winners. Choose any award winner and include which musical ..read more

American Ballet Theater has only been to Dallas twice in the last thirty years. The last time they were here, six years ago, they performed at Southern Methodist University in the more traditional  McFarlin auditorium. On this return to Dallas last Friday evening, the performance took place in the ultra contemporary Winspear Opera House, to present masterworks by four renowned choreographers : Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, Paul Taylor and Alexei Ratmansky.

What began as a slow evening of dance, with ballet ..read more

Names and dates of death. That’s how My Tidy List of Terrors begins, in the dark with grainy photographs of murdered children projected onto a curtain upstage. A child playing with a boat, surrounded by a menacing circle of masked African tribal figures, plucks at our most basic instincts. There’s power  in playwright Jonathan Norton’s subject matter, but little subtlety in the presentation.

Dallas-based Norton relies on his chosen backdrop—the Atlanta child murders of the 1980s, during which at least 29 child ..read more

Sarah Ruhl wrote this contemporary farce while she was still in graduate school, back in 2001. She wrote it before Garden State, before The Shins vomited a certain kind of sadness into our collective conscience. She wrote it before Nathan Rabin coined the character “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”  The play is imperfectly crafted and top heavy, relying on both the director’s sensitivity and the actor playing Tilly, the sad-eyed lead, to see us through to a rather hasty end.

If one ..read more

This Tuesday’s giveaway is a giant. Literally. The Dallas Theater Center brings Giant to the stage for a three hour performance matched with a 13-piece orchestra and a cast of twenty-three. And we’ve got tickets. To get your hands on them all you have to do is answer the question in the form below: Giant was the first installment in what project? We’ll pick a winner after 3pm.

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There’s plenty of dance to see in DFW during the first half of 2012 representing national, international and local performers. Considering the current economic downturn, it is interesting to observe the production decisions some of our local dance companies have made in an attempt to emerge unscathed: fewer performances, smaller, less expensive venues, etc. As we have noted before, performances and new works do stimulate the local economy by providing a career for dancers, musicians and others involved in production. ..read more

Sometimes “important” stories lose their effectiveness no matter how many times we are reminded of why they are so. But then there are works that transcend redundancy and endure even bad iterations. What a nice surprise, then, when a fresh adaptation of a stalwart original receives a remarkable production with an incredible cast and crew. WaterTower Theatre’s The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and adapted by Wendy Kesselman makes a crucial play come alive.

The tremendous ..read more

The honeymoon period for all things “New Year” is over and it’s time to slip back into something a bit more comfortable. This Tuesday’s giveaway brings us back to the annual performance of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change at Theatre Three. We’ve got two tickets to their signature romance piece on January 20th and all you have to do to get your hands on them is answer the question in the form below: The play has performed in Turkey, Taiwan and Barcelona–to name a few. Tell us how many translations of the play have been produced. We’ll pick a winner after 3pm.

Photo: (From left) : Jeff Kinman, Lisa Jae Miller, Bradley Campbell, Carrie Slaughter-Whittlesey from last year’s production of ‘I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change’ (Credit: Ken Birdsell for Theatre Two)

“All good stories start with a Jew” quips the character of Baruch de Spinoza in New Jerusalem.  Stage West Theatre bears that particular truth out in its provocative brain tickler of a production of David Ives’ play about the 17th century Jewish philosopher.

New York City-based playwright Ives (All in the Timing, The Liar, Is He Dead?) is primarily known for his adaptations and one-act comedies. New Jerusalem represents a more sober, Tom Stoppard-esque intellectual exercise presented in the style of a ..read more

That’s what Mark Lowry wonders on Theater Jones, and he makes some solid points. While Dallas has produced some nationally respected playwrights (Octavio Solis and Regina Taylor), and is home to theaters, notably the Undermain, Kitchen Dog, and Dallas Theater Center, that often host world premiers by emerging and established authors alike, much the work written by local playwrights is produced by organizations with the specific mission of staging work by local talent or in the context of new works festivals.

But 2012 will see a large number works by local playwrights produced by a broad range of companies:

Full productions of new works by local writers at professional, established stages like Kitchen Dog, Stage West, Echo Theatre and Dallas Children’s Theater. It’s also happening at theaters that have gained a high level of local respect in less than a decade, such as Second Thought Theatre and Upstart Productions; as well as at relative newcomers like Triple J Productions, DVA Productions and Nouveau 47 Theatre. The universities and community theaters are in the game, too.

Lowry wonders: Will these playwrights have the same kind of impact on Dallas’ theater reputation as local authors had on places like Chicago, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia? We will see.

For now, here are some of the names to watch: Jon Christie, Jonathan Norton, Kevin Kautzman, Matthew Posey, Allison Moore, Steven Walters, Isabella Russell-Ides, Larry Herold, Eric Steele, Bretton B. Holmes, Matt Lyle, Matthew J. Edwards, Jennifer Porter Kennard, Vicki Caroline Cheatwood, and Thomas Riccio.

Image: Promo photo for Jon Chrsitie’s Superhero at Triple J Productions

That was fast. The musical comedy that got its start as Give It Up at the Dallas Theater Center, and then went on to a well-received Off Broadway run, opened on Broadway on December 14. But stories of slagging ticket sales quickly followed the trail of mixed reviews. Now, Lysistrata Jones is no more. It will close this Sunday after just 34 preview performances and 30 regular performances. Here’s more.

What better way to enter into the new year than having a magician share his secrets? Well we can’t promise you’ll learn how David Blaine has survived being frozen, buried or drowned but the magic man will be at the Winspear Opera House on January 12th for the Brinker International Forum speaker series and we’ve got two tickets to giveaway. To get your hands on them all you have to do is answer the question in the form below: What ..read more

Ten years ago when I saw Les Misérables in London, I jokingly vowed that it would be for the last time. No offense meant to the cast, but I had already seen the adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel in two national tours and through countless screenings of the 10th anniversary “dream cast” and recent 25th anniversary “all-star” concerts. My rear end, numbed by the show’s three-hour running time, just couldn’t take it anymore, mainly because I felt that Les ..read more

To look back at the year in theater, we asked our three theater writers to tell us the plays and performances that stood out for them in 2011. Here are their picks.

Image: Cabaret at the Dallas Theater Center (Karen Almond)

To look back at the year in theater, we asked our three theater writers to tell us the plays and performances that stood out for them in 2011. Here are Liz Johnstone’s picks.

Plays

The Shipment (Undermain Theatre). The Undermain’s production of Young Jean Lee’s unconventional play, directed by SMU’s Stan Wojewodski, was pitch-perfect. I hadn’t walked out of a show more enthusiastic about a performance in ages, and months later, I find myself wanting to see it again just to recapture ..read more

To look back at the year in theater, we asked our three theater writers to tell us the plays and performances that stood out for them in 2011. Here are Lance Lusk’s picks.

Plays

As You Like It / Macbeth (Trinity Shakespeare Festival): Three years into its run, and the Trinity Shakespeare Festival continues to provide stellar Bard work. Last summer’s repertory double-shot of a contemplative and beautiful As You Like It (dir. T.J. Walsh) and a spooky stunner of a Macbeth ..read more