Arts Blog

The last show I saw at this year's Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at WaterTower Theatre -- I'm taking a much-needed few days off beginning in the morning -- was David Bithell's The Difference Engine. This interdisciplinary artist is an assistant professor of musical composition at UNT. From the program's description of "Rube Goldberg wizardry," I was more or less expecting something like that video of a music-making machine that went viral on YouTube. Remember the one? It had ping pong balls flying around making a kind of fugue for wind and percussion.

Well, this wasn't like that. Bithell's wizardry was mostly of the electronic variety, though there was one assemblage that included a beautiful downward metal spriral among a lot of hanging wires. What we had was a hollow-faced young man moving around (silently, at least as far as language went), using motion and light to produce all kinds of electronic feedback loops that produced sounds. It was like a wordless Samuel Beckett play with a score by John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen during their electronic periods.
Especially when we got more and more videos featuring Bithell doing clownish things with his eyes and face.

I was fascinated by three of the four main segments: that wire assemblage (though I was hoping for a more dramatic final descent of the tiny camera on a wire), the magical light box, and this electronic gameboard, kind of like a Xerox machine on which the artist moved around pieces like chessman made by a weird alchemist (all the while making the musical sounds by turning on little flashlights and luminescent rods). The long segment where he made sounds by moving his head right and left and up and down proved, frankly, boring -- especially since it was followed by what seemed a computer glitch as his assistant pored over a keyboard to the side.

A number of people left, beginning about halfway through. Perhaps they were expecting something more akin to the act next door, The Three Redneck Tenors. Nothing redneck about Bithell. My own response (except for that tedious part) was much more positive. I liked the piece, though I didn't quite love it.

Actually, the only thing I loved about this year's Loop was the very first thing I saw, the first of Mike Daisey's five (all different) appearances. (I kind of wish I had just seen all five Daisey shows, but that wouldn't really have been doing my job as your critical explorer, would it?) This was a disappointment, considering that most previous Loop festivals have produced small shows by local groups or individuals that were on my end-of-year best lists. But I do salute WaterTower for bringing in Daisey and the other two big name headliners this year...Daisey, especially, is a major artist that it was really good for Dallas to see. As for the rest, there's always next year!

Debates are good. Healthy discussions about the pros and cons of an issue can bring about new perspectives and ideas. Opinions are like...well, you get the gist.

In my recent blog entry "In the West End with Keira Knightley," I briefly mentioned the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Love Never Dies, and released a firestorm of opinions regarding the show in the comments section.

One person heartily supported it, using the name "Love Shouldn't Die," while another who was a detractor of the musical chose "Love Should Die." Succinct, don't you think? But here's my question, who cares? It's a musical, not the health care debate.

Neither commenter had even seen the show. I had to beg a friend of mine who had seen Love Never Dies in previews to comment and give a knowledgeable opinion. And even she refused to say anything until she had seen the final preview before the show opened. Now that the reviews are out, I ask again: who cares?

For the Friday preview of Fat Pig at 7:30 p.m., Dallas Theater Center is offering pay-what-you-can tickets, which will only be available at the Wyly Theatre box office beginning at 10 a.m. that day.

It's part of the Beauty Plays series, which features three shows that DTC is running in repertory. Here's what our theater critic Lawson Taitte says of the first part, The Shape of Things, "People do insufferable things in Neil LaBute plays. What keeps the works from becoming inhuman is the quality of the suffering you feel in the victims. By that measure, or by any other, the Dallas Theater Center's The Shape of Things is a triumph." Check out the full review here.

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Contemporary drama has quite a repertoire of dramas based on the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. The latest comes from Denton by way of Addison: Videotape, Sundown Collaborative Theatre's entry in the 2009 Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at WaterTower Theatre.

Cody Lucas wrote the piece and plays Abraham, one of a pair of brothers locked in an apartment, watching TV and eating delivery fast food. Ben Darling is the elder sibling, Christian. We learn that they've been there for years, since their father (Zane Harris, seen only on video) abandoned them. They've developed a whole culture based on television series -- down to a religion in which they have to appease the tube when something goes haywire.

Under director Christopher David Taylor, the production doesn't feel very polished. But it does have a lot of (appropriately) loopy energy and builds to a big climax. My biggest problem with the piece is the premise itself: Where do they get the money for the hamburgers? How come they have clothes that more or less fit? Who pays the rent? But the show does make me curious to see more work by this company of mostly UNT students.

On a Tuesday evening, it's terrific to see the WaterTower Theatre parking filled nearly to capacity for the OUt of the Loop Fringe Festival. A lot of Dallas theater folk are here to see the staged reading of Donald Fowler's in-process musical about Jack the Ripper, Creep! I reluctantly decided against seeing it myself. Often when I see a workshop or staged reading and really like it, I find myself disappointed when I see the finished product in a full production -- patently unfair to the artist. So....

Instead I caught up with Cyrano Players' Communication Breakdown, written and produced by Molly Moroney.(Full disclosure: She's the sister of Dallas Morning News publisher Jim Moroney.) This is a set of three short plays on the topic of customer service -- featuring some of Dallas' most capable actors.

The overarching theme is frustration...almost to the point of paranoia. In "Hazards at Horizons," an airline employee in charge of recovering lost baggage takes a dislike to a customer and is, shall we say, non-responsive. The title piece is potentially much scarier -- a cable installer turns out to be part of a scam. And in the finale, "Futilitarian Hell" -- which was the germ of the trilogy -- a woman gets the run-around from four different bank employees on the telephone when she tries to rectify a billing mistake.

Part of the interest in these pieces lies in their ambiguity. In the first two parts, particularly, the unsatisfied customer comes off as hostile even before the trouble starts. I would like to see each short play more fully developed. As they stand, both the substance and tone separate them all from mere sketches. But just as the set-up gets interesting, the action stops. I wanted more plot, more reversals, more action.

I especially liked Trey Walpole and Linda Leonard as the co-conspirators in the title play and Moira Wilson as the increasingly infuriated caller in the final piece.

Hip Pocket Theatre will be holding auditions for its summer season at its space northwest of Fort Worth on Saturday, March 27, and Sunday, March 28. Go to the company's website for details and an appointment.

There are also internships available in the following areas:
Technical Direction
Master Electrician
Sound Engineering and Design
Set and Properties Design
Assistant to Lighting Designer - Nikki DeShea Smith
Wardrobe Supervisor
Assistant to Producer/Costume Designer - Diane Simons
Stage Management
Marketing/Promotion/Development
Puppetry (Cowtown Puppetry Festival with NYC artists- Lake Simons, Chris Green & Erin Orr)
Outreach in schools, libraries & hospitals
Assistant to Artistic Director - Johnny Simons
Assistant to Guest Directors - Lake Simons, David Yeakle and John Moore

With the hypnotic Phantom of the Opera playing Dallas Summer Musicals at the Music Hall at Fair Park (through Sunday) and the score refusing to stop swirling around my brain, I was a bit startled and more than intrigued to catch an NPR story about a Phantom sequel in the works for 2011. Composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and directed by the Tony Award winning director Jack O'Brien, Love Never Dies (and neither evidently does the Phantom) picks up the story 10 years later in CONEY ISLAND (that is not a typo) and yes, the triangle of Christine, the Phantom and Raoul is still very much in play. You can read about it here.

I can't wait. Maybe -- for better or for worse -- it will at long last dislodge "The Music of the Night" from my brain.

The second and third shows I saw Sunday at WaterTower Theatre's Out of the Loop Fringe Festival were both one-man shows written by the performer. The similarities pretty much end there.

Brad McEntire, found of Audacity Theatre Lab, did a play called Chop. It's really a play, with a story line and other characters, though the speaker does interact with the audience (and merely describes the other characters, of course). The rather extreme premise provokes rather little emotional flutter. I found myself wondering what the point of the piece was. I have to say, though, that with New York director Andrew J. Merkel's assistance, McEntire gives a fresh and impressive performance.

Seth Rudetzky -- known as the music director on MTV's star-search Legally Blonde series and as the host of Sirius Radio's afternoon Broadway show -- was one of the two headliners of the festival's first weekend. He's an immensely entertaining personality, so it was a pleasure to watch Broadway Seth Rudetzky Style. But it's not really even a performance piece. It's actually a lecture illustrated by lots of delightful recorded examples. The subject is the kind of Broadway singing Rudetzky likes best, belting. (So no mention of Barbara Cook and only a back-handed compliment to Julie Andrews.)

Really, the show is a combo of very picky criticism and gossipy complaint. Rudetzky worships the like of Barbra Streisand, Patti LuPone and Betty Buckley (who he has accompanied on local stages). But he's willing to pick apart even Streisand and LuPone.

I know quite a bit about Broadway musicals, and I learned an enormous amount from Rudetzky's show. And it was great fun. But it's still a little weird to put a classroom in a festival like that.

Last November the Brinker International Forum brought movie star Hilary Swank to the Winspear Opera House to speak to a well-heeled audience. Last week's Brinker International Forum's panel discussion titled "The Creative Process" also featured three big names (four, if you count moderator and CNN anchor Campbell Brown), actor-writer-producer-director Bob Balaban; producer-studio-head Peter Guber; and director Brett Ratner who discussed how their ideas become feature films. It was a one hour panel discussion, and began with promotional clips that lasted the first fifteen minutes of the hour.

One of those promotional clips was particularly cheesy, and frankly, an hour is not long enough for those of us actually interested in the creative process of filmmaking, but probably more than enough for some of the audience that night (several with tickets in the closest rows were very late, which leads me to believe those up in front might have been more interested in attending the private "meet and greet "with the speakers than in hearing what these three heavy-hitters actually had to say about filmmaking.) But I digress.

Rite of Passage Theatre Company has been around for the last year -- at festivals only, far as I can tell. The previous offerings were scripts by co-founder Clay Wheeler. At this year's Out of the Loop, Wheeler (a Baylor University grad) directs a piece by Baylor professor Thomas Ward.

Binge is about an overweight young man, Doug (Mark C. Guerra), who wants to have gastric bypass surgery. The scenes alternate between interviews with thecrass surgeon (James Prince) and vignettes from Doug's regular life. Co-worker Chris (Roger Schwermer), an even crasser lady's man, tries to fix Doug up with the receptionist. But Doug actually starts striking sparks with the new pizza delivery woman, Beth (Rachel Hall).

The show's first half hour is aptly described by one of the character's observations on the interminable sessions between doctor and patient: "Boring!" Things start to get more interesting when Beth comes on the scene, however. She's quirky and a breath of fresh air.

The play turns dark at the end. Ultimately we have so little empathy with any of these people that we wonder why we bothered to spend so much time with them. But the performance is pretty good all the way around. It was especially nice to see Guerra get a chance at a larger role (he frequently does bit parts around town). Here he's sensitive without being annoying about it.

It's sometimes difficult to believe that barely more than a generation ago someone like Lenny Bruce could get put in jail for saying a certain four-letter word onstage. Especially when you see a show like My First Time, WaterTower Theatre's own contribution to its ninth Out of the Loop Fringe Festival.

Ken Davenport adapted the theater piece from many of the submissions to the famous 1990s website that invited people to share their first sexual experiences. Four actors, two male and two female, take all the roles. Sometimes they just say a word or two taken from the stories. Sometimes they give us a complete account.

As you might imagine, the level of sexual frankness is high. A time traveler from the 1960s or before would probably die of a heart attack in his or her seat.

Two years ago Mark Fleischer (the man who turned Plano Repertory Theatre into a major group before he went off to graduate school and it died) came back to town to direct WaterTower's festival show. That one was terrifically performed. So is this one.

Only for the bold and unembarrassable.

Theater people -- and I suspect audiences -- have to relate a new work to something they already know in order to begin taking it in.

For the first matinee slot in this year's Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at WaterTower Theatre, I chose to see Club 119 Productions' I Sing! It's a chamber musical (music by Eli Bolin, lyrics by Sam Forman) that played New York a decade ago and vanished. I'm always eager to see a fresh small musical, and this one features some of our busiest younger actors. (Photo by Vladimir Meyman.)

After a long first act, I retreated to the lobby and had a conversation with actor Stan Graner (who's currently starring in Artisan Center Theater's Brigadoon). He asked if I thought I Sing! sounded like bad William Finn.

I said, "No, I was thinking Avenue Q -- without the jokes and the puppets."

Bach in the Studio Space, Dallas Observer and TheaterJones critic Elaine Liner piped up, "This is Avenue Q without the puppets."

Great minds.

Like I said, we all need to relate a new work to something. But actually I think Elaine and I were basically wrong. Read on to see why.

I know next to nothing about dance. I must preface this entry with this piece of information, because I am about to talk about a new musical on Broadway that deals entirely with dance. Please feel free to elaborate in the comments on anything you feel I may omit here simply from dance ignorance.

Twyla Tharp, fresh on the heels of her megahit Movin' Out, centered around the music of Billy Joel, has brought her vivacious and impassioned choreography together with the songbook of Frank Sinatra in Come Fly Away, which opens on Broadway on March 25.

It is not entirely fair to critique a show while it is still in previews. Before a show opens, many concepts and missteps are still fluid and ready for changes. Especially in a show like Come Fly Away, there is room for improvement and time to fix problems.

Since I know theatre, I have two main pieces of advice and neither one has a thing to do with the incredible choreography. Twyla's got that under control.

I'm about to leave for the opening night of WaterTower Theatre's 2010 Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, where I'll see the first of five different one-man shows New York-based performance artists Mike Daisey will be doing. You can read my review when it goes online late tonight. You can see my Guide advance story here, and go to WaterTower's own site for detailed information.

That's a photo of Daisey, by the way.

I'll be seeing six different shows on Saturday and Sunday and catching up with as much more as I can next week. Look here on the Arts Blog for my thoughts, written live at the theater in Addison.

I have been back from London over a week now. Sometimes I still cannot believe I went. When I get guilty about the amount of money I spent for what basically amounted to three days, I think of the play Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth.

An entire trip worth one play, you ask incredulously? Yes, worth it for one play; and I'm not even sure I understood the plot.

Reading reviews, discussing the play with an English friend who loved it and basically mulling it over in my mind for the last 11 days has helped me come to a conclusion about Jerusalem. The amount of work and thought about the three-act play dominated by Tony Award-winner (for Boeing-Boeing), Mark Rylance, justified my spontaneity by simply making me think.

It is easy to think of Judy Garland today and make a joke. Whether you are referring to drug addiction, gay icons or simply celebrity gone awry, she can evoke a shake of the head and a 'what a waste' attitude. At least for some people.

For others, Judy Garland represents triumph over tragedy, overcoming adversity and strength when the world pulls the rug out from under you. But there is no denying her devastating talent.

During my trip to London, I hopped a commuter train to Northampton, 67 miles to the northwest. My friend and I were invited to the Royal & Derngate, a 125 year-old theater which has been renovated into a glossy and impressive showcase. End of the Rainbow by Peter Quilter revolves around the 1969 concerts at London's Talk of the Town, which would mark the beginning of the last months of her life.

Jaw-dropping is one of those terms that people throw around, but I found my mouth gaping in amazement again and again during the opening night of Cirque du Soleil's Alegría in Frisco. The performers just kept surprising me. A woman spinning five silver hoops on her arms, her neck, her torso, her legs, wiggling to send each of the hoops flying into the hands of another performer. A pair of acrobats more flexible than anyone I've ever seen (arch-of-foot to shoulder, rear end to back-of-head flexible). A seven-man trapeze act. It's all woven into a slightly bizarre, quick-paced dreamscape of music, elaborate costumes and circus art.

The clowns in this Cirque production are quite funny, with jokes ranging from imitations of the acts that remind the audience members of the almost-impossibility of the feats they've just seen, to horse-flatulence humor, to audience-participation bits (if you sit on the floor level, be warned, they might recruit you).

Worried about the venue being an arena? Don't. Dr Pepper Arena can be adapted to fit the performance, and one end of the arena is sectioned off with a black curtain in a way that feels intimate. When the lights come up and you see the arena-style ads (Hooters, Ikea, Texans Credit Union) on the screens around the sides of the venue and the Texas Tornado Robertson Cup Champions banner overhead, it's like waking up from a dream. The show runs through Sunday.

The three productions I have seen of "Equus" did not go for nudity. But Uptown Players is never shy in going for the nudity that is either written or implied in a script.

In their upcoming production of "Equus" a scene that in the script has the young protagonist pantomiming undressing will skip the pantomime and go for full nudity. Another nude scene has been staged between the protagonist and the young woman. It will be interesting to hear from audience and critics whether the nudity added to or distracted from the production.

Angela talks about some bargains in the previous entry, but there's another one tonight -- Tuesday, Feb. 23, only. The Dallas Theater Center offers pay-what-you-can admission to the first preview of The Shape of Things (the first in its Neil LaBut "Beauty Plays" trilogy) tonight. Hurry -- the curtain is at 7 p.m. Just walk up to the box office.

Just a reminder that Kitchen Dog Theater still offers pay what you can nights, because, as Artistic Director, Tina Parker, notes "theater without an audience is frankly, just rehearsal" and Kitchen Dog Theater believes in keeping theater accessible and affordable to everyone who wants to see a show.

I like that attitude.

Kitchen Dog Theater is the only theater that offers so many PWYC opportunities- 6 out of 18 performances are pay what you can. You don't see yesterday's theater at KDT very often, so if you fret over shelling out $20 or so to see a show, you can pay what you can on Wednesday and Thursday performances. Kitchen Dog Theater will still welcome you.

I just received notice that tickets to Uptown Players' upcoming production of "Equus" (at the Kalita Humphrey Theater) will be in the $30-$40 range. This is a pretty big jump in Uptown ticket pricing, though still not horrible pricey, and there's a good reason for the jump in price -the show is well known - people will pay it- and the space and the rights to perform the show are probably a big part of the show's budget. It's an ongoing plight - how to keep ticket prices low enough to fill seats, while rental (and other) costs escalate.

Kitchen Dog Theater produces classics and would do a really kick A production of "Equus" too, but for the most part they produce very contemporary, edgy plays that have little Broadway (or any other) word of mouth build. On the boards now is "BOOM" by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb - check it out until March 13. 214.953.1055 or www.kitchendogtheater.org

"Equus" by Peter Shaffer is helped along by a strong revival and great word of mouth - it's an old show, but it's not a waxwork yet. February 26- March 21 at Uptown Players, 214 219 2718 or www.uptownplayers.org