“Shen Wei is a visual artist as well as a choreographer, and all his dances take moving design as their subject” –Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, September 2006

Early on a Thursday evening New York-based choreographer Shen Wei, winner of this year’s Southern Methodist University Meadows Prize, met with a small group of local dance critics to discuss the three week residency he has just completed at the university. We gathered around a table in a large conference room just outside the ..read more

Larry Herold’s new play, The Sports Page, receiving its world premiere at Stage West, takes us back to the declining days of the almighty sportswriter. It’s about football, it’s chock full of crowd-pleasing Dallas vs. Fort Worth jokes, and there are plenty of witty one-liners. The trouble is the play, like many of us writers, loves the clack of its own keys. It’s like music, the click and return, the composition of a symphony one deadline after another.

Put aside the ..read more

There’s no mystery to supply suspense in Matthew Posey’s messy new musical, Mean, a highly fictionalized, metaphysical account of how Charles Manson, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, and Lynnette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, now integral characters in the annals of American crime, met. Reading the synopsis, a musical comedy about a murderous cult leader might seem like another one of Posey’s weird trips. But despite the production’s more outlandish elements, it’s more of an exercise in entirely normal psychological curiosity.

Posey gives us a paean ..read more

At first glance, Bring It On: The Musical is practically begging to be mocked. It’s a musical about cheerleaders, based on a trifling 2000 Kirsten Dunst film about cheerleaders, and did I mention it’s a musical about cheerleaders? With the swift rise of Give It Up! and the even swifter demise of its Broadway incarnation Lysistrata Jones, a musical about cheerleaders should have seemed like an obviously unwise theatrical gamble.

Yet…somehow…this show works.

At its helm is a quintet of Broadway vets ..read more

The Washington Post looks into the growing trend of performing arts organizations broadcasting their productions to movie theaters around the world. The National Theatre does it. The Los Angeles Philharmonic will broadcast its Mahler’s Eighth, performed by more than 1,000 musicians in Caracas, Venezuela. And at the Angelika this week, you can go and watch a guided walk through of the Leonardi da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery in London.

New York’s Metropolitan Opera, of course, was the pioneer in movie theater performance, and despite initial skepticism from critics, the company has turned the broadcasts, along with accompanying DVDs and recordings, into a profitable business model.

Critics have had to eat their words, since the HD broadcasts are the most successful single element of Gelb’s tenure, and have proved truly visionary. They have raised the profile of opera, created excitement where there was none, and rather than bankrupting the company, as many predicted, they have made money. In 2010-11 they netted an impressive $11 million.

But the Met has a particular brand and audience, built over decades of international radio broadcasts, so the model isn’t exactly replicable for other groups. That has not stopped ballet, theater, music, and other companies from trying. What many have found, though, is  is that not unlike their actually live performances, theater broadcasts require a good deal of marketing to sell tickets. And the competition – deep-pocketed movie studies – is steep.

Photo Marcello Giordani and Angela Meade will perform in the Met’s upcoming broadcast of Verdi’s Ernani.

There’s a scene in Night of the Iguana in which Lawrence Shannon (Ashley Wood), the mentally disturbed, ignominious minister at the center of the play, expounds upon his views of religion. He’s standing on the veranda of a ramshackle hotel in Mexico on the edge of a rainforest. A storm is brewing, low and deep. In the thunder, in the lightning and the rain, Shannon sees the master of the universe. He is wild, vengeful, refreshing, indiscriminate— and we could ..read more

Company members of Ailey II, younger sibling of dance ensemble Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, are set to embark on a 32-city tour that includes international stops in Bermuda, Germany and Greece. On February 20th, they’ll land at Bass Performance Hall.

Guess who’s got a pair of tickets? That’s right—we do. But we’ll gladly share. To witness the up-and-comers of the dance and choreography world in action, all you have to do is “like” us on Facebook and answer the following ..read more

Ever wonder what effect High School Musical has had on, well, high school musicals? Well, we know that Dallas Summer Musicals is sponsoring the 1^st Annual DSM High School Musical Theatre Awards, launching in May. That comes a year after Lyric Stage began its own high school musical awards. So just how good are local high school musical productions getting?

Here’s some proof. It has been some time since I’ve attended a high school musical, but I know it looked and sounded nothing like these videos from the dress rehearsal of J.J. Pearce High School’s production of Phantom of the Opera. You can check out a couple of numbers from the Pearce production below. In the meantime, I’m holding out hope that high school dramas begin looking like this.

There is a scene in Charles Smith’s Free Man of Color at the African American Repertory Theater where the character of John Newton Templeton stands shirtless, resolute and defiant in the face of his white mentor, that sends the powerful message that this is a play, actor, and theater that will not be overlooked.

Smith, an Emmy Award-winning playwright and distinguished professor has written a play that is based on the fascinating true story of Templeton (Christopher Dontrell Piper), “the first ..read more

Bridges usually represent safety and stability. They tend to extend over troubled waters, or span the gap between warring factions to bring peace. How tragic, then, when these bulwarks of constancy fail and leave us broken, literally and figuratively. Kitchen Dog Theater offers an engaging look at that dichotomy in their production of Allison Moore’s healing through humor play, Collapse.

The play is the third in Kitchen Dog’s 21st season, and in a symmetrical twist, it is the third of three ..read more

Pluck the Day, a rewrite of an original script by Second Thought Theatre’s co-artistic director, Steven Walters, is a solid skeleton of a play. There is a setting (a small, backwards town in West Texas), actors (mostly playing paper-thin stereotypes), a modicum of relationship drama masquerading as plot. But everything feels incidental to the main joke— Duck (Clay Yokum, a real gem), the pitiable redneck who makes for the biggest cartoon of all. The rest just act as a foil ..read more

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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