A former welding shop in West Dallas is a sweltering, sprawling den. Divided up into drastically different set pieces, the play does not require scene changes, but rather a change of pace, because we are the ones that move, trailing the performers from a two-story metal cage, a snowy-white bedroom, a dark forest, a weird facsimile of an upscale boutique. The stifling heat of an unairconditioned, unoccupied building right on the cusp of Texas summer is, for a show set ..read more

Familial responsibility and thwarted obligations have been themes ripe for the stage since the ancient Athenians. What do we do when so many compelling forces tear at our conscience and duty duels with drive? These are the enduring questions that young playwright Nathan Louis Jackson investigates in his drama-with-a-message, Broke-ology, currently onstage at Jubilee Theatre.

The play is directed by Jubilee’s Artistic Director Tre Garrett, who has recently been selected by the National Endowment for the Arts to sit on the ..read more

The Dallas Children’s Theater has themed their 2012-2013 season “Passport To Imagination,” and one of the features of the new season: kids in subscriber families will receive a workbook with each performance filled with games, tibits, and other activities. As for the productions, in addition to DCT classics like Junie B. In Jingle Bells, Batman Smells!, as well as puppet adaptations of fairy tales like The Nutcracker and Rumplestilskin from the Kathy Burks Theatre of Puppetry Arts, there will be adaptations of ..read more

Admit it: as much as we pretend to enjoy intellectual, cultivated entertainment, there is a part of each of us that yearns for the exposed vulgarity of reality TV. Table-flipping, drink-throwing, insult hurling—watching others channel their most primitive selves is as thrilling as it is comforting, if only because it reinforces our own refinement. But how sophisticated are we, really? Playwright Yasmina Reza argues that no matter the cut of our clothes or the sum of our bank accounts, we ..read more

The Dallas Theater Center has added two new actors to the Brierley Resident Acting Company, both with strong ties to Southern Methodist University.

Tiffany Hobbs just finished her MFA at SMU, and she also appeared in the DTC’s Cabaret and A Christmas Carol. She’s taking a post with the company that another SMU grad, Abbey Siegworth, is vacating. The other new member, Kieran (Michael) Connolly, is the former head of the acting program at SMU, where he taught Hobbs and Siegworth. He ..read more

You’ve seen her in the West Wing, heard her sing in Wicked, now Broadway, film, and television star Kristin Chenoweth will be performing a rare concert appearance at the Winspear Opera House on Thursday, May 24. Today is Thursday, so you know what that means: we have a pair of tickets to giveaway to the performance. To get your hands on them, just enter your information in the form below and answer this question: Chenoweth was only the third musical ..read more

It’s not based on a movie or TV show. It doesn’t boast a C-list celebrity headliner. It isn’t a loosely strung-together staging of a popular music group’s catalog. Memphis is—believe it or not—an original Broadway musical, full of its own heart and rhythm. Perhaps because it’s been so long since we’ve been presented with something not “inspired by” or “based on,” some might find it a tad difficult to grab hold of Memphis. No matter—the show grabs us within the ..read more

If the playwright Harold Pinter is to be believed, truth is a variable. Versions of events rarely match up. People remember things differently or at least say they do. Reality and the unreal are mutable. The absurdist world of his plays, especially The Birthday Party, is our world, only spinning backwards or maybe just faster, unburdened by the need for explanation, yet imbued with a nihilistic understanding that our existence is finite but, most importantly, flammable. Everything we know could ..read more

For some people, nothing’s scarier than a bunch of hyper youths with an amplified opportunity to voice their disillusionment amidst the frenetic chords of punk rock. It’s even scarier when that display is technically categorized as Tony Award-winning theater. A number of people walked out during opening night of American Idiot, the touring Broadway musical built around Green Day’s seminal 2004 album of the same name. Those who stayed, however, were treated to an extraordinarily staged narrative of the rage, ..read more

The Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau is looking to capitalize on new Texas legislation that allows for the adoption of non-geographic Public Improvement Districts, or PIDs, which would levee a two percent sales tax on hotels in Dallas. And of the estimated $10 million that could be generated by a new Tourism PID, DCVB head Phillip Jones says upwards of $3 million will be earmarked towards promoting cultural tourism.

That news, which came via a city of Dallas Economic Development Committee ..read more

On Saturday, the Dallas Mavericks made an early exit from the NBA playoffs. But the loss at home to the Oklahoma City Thunder also meant the end to another season, that of the Dallas Mavericks Dancers.

Gone are the days of “line dancers” and “pom-pom girls” giggling and smiling at adoring fans between short and simply choreographed, low-expectation dance routines. The Dallas Mavericks Dancers ought  to be taken as seriously as any other trained dancers in a professional company. No, the ..read more

The Better Doctor, running now at Upstart Productions’  new home at The Nest in West Dallas, could be so much better. The play is presented with obvious care, but it’s hurt by a combination of things—a want for sure-handed direction, lackluster leads, sloppy slapstick. Considering playwright Matt Lyle’s success with his first “silent film on stage” venture, The Boxer, it seems odd that this would almost entirely failed to impress. Everything, from the writing to the acting to the attempts ..read more

I’ll start by saying I’m not necessarily the target audience for Uptown Player’s production of Silence of the Clams, a Silence of the Lambs parody that refers to exactly what you think it does. On my personal sliding humor scale, I have two strikes against me: I’m straight, and even more importantly, I’m female.

Why do gay men find lesbians so funny? Is it because the thought of one woman is distasteful enough that the idea of two together is just absurd? Is it the easy ..read more

Well, the musical that got its start as Give It Up! at the Dallas Theater Center, and brought Dallas’ Liz Mikel to New York for its Broadway bow, didn’t exactly last very long on the boards, but it did kick around long enough to garner a Tony Award nod for best book of a musical (Douglas Carter Beane).

Also of note, 2011 SMU Meadows Prize recipient Enda Walsh is also nominated in the best book of a musical category for Once. And I supposed I still consider the ghosts of Bonnie and Clyde locals (near and dear, at that). The musical based on their tabloid-stealing, bank robbing romp through North Texas garnered a best original score nod and a best actress nom for Laura Osnes.

Kim Rosenstock, playwright, is looking at me, but not looking at me. I’m sorry, she says, blue eyes wide. She’s distracted by the weird, floor-to-ceiling circle curtains (they look like someone went nuts with a giant hole punch) obscuring our view out the top floor of the Wyly. They look heavy, but they’re actually made of ultra-thick felt. We shoved them out of the way, revealing an astounding view of downtown, and continued with our conversation. We were talking about ..read more

We’ve got tickets to American Idiot, and if you’re smart, you’ll scoop them up.

Here’s three reasons why:

1. The production is coming to Winspear Opera House straight from Broadway. We’ve been told that if a show can make it there, it can make it anywhere. 2. American Idiot is based on Green Day’s Grammy Award-winning multi-platinum album by the same name. FYI, the story goes like this: three friends living in a post-9/11 world search for meaning as they choose between going ..read more

If you’re a sharp-shootin’ cowboy who loves banjos and boot-scootin’, or if you have kids who go crazy for Woody and the Toy Story 2 gang, then you’re going to want to enter today’s giveaway. We’ve got a family 4-pack of tickets that will get your gang in to see Riders in the Sky, performing live at AT&T Performing Arts Center on May 6th.

In addition to singing “Woody’s Round-up,” Riders in the Sky have a few other career highlights worth ..read more

When I walked out of the Dallas Theater Center’s production of Next Fall, which opened Friday at the Kalita Humprehys Theater, I was puzzling out the central relationship, the mismatched couple of Luke (Steven Walters) –young, devotely Christian — and Adam (Terry Martin), a middle-aged atheist who can’t resist the temptation to rag on Luke’s faith every chance he gets to the point of sounding like a broken record. The play hinges on our understanding (acceptance, really) that love occasionally ..read more

Things were going quite well for Theatre Three lately. The Aaron Sorkin-penned The Farnsworth Invention just completed a great run upstairs, and the amazing Superior Donuts is finishing up its sold-out awesomeness downstairs in Theatre Too.  These were a pair of shows as good as anything in North Texas. A pity, then, that the awful Art of Murder by Joe DiPietro landed on Routh street to spoil all of that momentum.

DiPietro wrote the book and lyrics to that execrable, crowd-pleasing (why, God, ..read more

On Thursday we offered a family 4-pack of tickets to Annie Jr. at Casa Manana. Thanks to a brief interruption caused by another giveaway (we’re talking about you, Dallas International Film Festival), we’ve still got them. Which means they’re yours for the taking.

Here’s a quick recap of what’s on the table:

Annie Jr. is showing at Casa Manana from April 27-May 20, and we’ve got a family 4-pack of tickets that will get you and your kiddos in to opening night. The ..read more

Broadway’s Christopher Sieber has spent years building a resume that’s as eclectic as it is impressive—his Tony-nominated performances in Shrek The Musical and Spamalot come instantly to mind—but it’s his flamboyant, hilarious, and poignant turn as Albin in the national tour of La Cage Aux Folles currently validating my opinion that he is one of the most interesting leading men on stage today.

Sieber is no stranger to this production of La Cage, which originated in London at the Menier Chocolate ..read more

Annie Jr. is showing at Casa Manana from April 27-May 20, and we’ve got a family 4-pack of tickets that will get you and your kiddos in to opening night. The show includes all the classic tunes, including “Easy Street” and “It’s the Hard Knock Life.” But let’s not kid ourselves: we all know that you’ll be singing the-sun’ll-come-out-tomorrow the whole way home. Winning our tickets is simple: like us on Facebook and fill out the form below. You can bet your ..read more

“The best stories always begin in the garden,” claims a character in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.  And while that may be true in James’ world, lately in Dallas Theater, good stories have been marked of late by a collaboration between Christina Vela and the Kitchen Dog Theater. Kitchen Dog Artistic Company Member Vela, who directs a chilling and striking production of Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of James’ ghost story novella, is recently off a rousing performance of 26 ..read more

The Real Thing is arguably one of the cerebral playwright Tom Stoppard’s most feeling plays. When it was first performed, the emotional depth astounded as much as Stoppard’s more characteristic tricky wordplay and the shifting worlds created by the layering of  several-plays-within-a-play. In Stage West’s spare, minimalistic production that opened last week, an actor emerges to lead us, capably, into a place where words alternately create and destroy and love trumps things like dignity and self-preservation. If that place feels ..read more

Playwright Tracy Letts is known for being provocative. The movie version of his 1991 play Killer Joe was recently slapped with an NC-17 rating, Bug saw Ashley Judd getting seriously creeped out by Michael Shannon. And Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts are gearing up to film Letts’ 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning saga of the ultimate dysfunctional family, August: Osage County. While no doubt Meryl will deliver a deliciously cruel turn as drug-addled matriarch Violet Weston, the intimacy of the play—the fact ..read more