Linda Blase

See also: The Rise of the Understudies

Over the next five years, the AT&T Performing Arts Center and Shakespeare Dallas will present all of William Shakespeare's work, including every one of the plays and sonnets. If he wrote any mash notes or shopping lists, they'll do those, too. < em>The Complete Works of William Shakespeare will be presented in monthly staged readings (eight per year) in the 200-seat Hamon Hall at the Winspear Opera House. Dallas actors and directors will collaborate on the performances.

"We obviously have a passion for Shakespeare and his entire catalogue of work," said Shakespeare Dallas' artistic director Raphael Parry in a press release. "This unique partnership really allows us to use our decades of experience in order to share all of this, including his lesser known works, with Dallas audiences."

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Mike Morgan

Teri Rogers and Coy Covington

Playwright Charles Busch always plays the leading lady in his en travisti comedies on a New York stage. But Dallas actor Coy Covington is so close to Busch's league of broadly comic cross-dressing broads that the playwright takes tips from him on how to be a funnier her. Covington's latest triumph in a Busch show is the current Uptown Players' production of The Divine Sister, a rip-roaring rout of those sappy nun movies of the 1960s.

Director Andi Allen knows her Trouble with Angels and Sound of Music line for line, so Busch's digs at the sisters of fictional St. Veronica's Convent in the show are twice as funny with the additions of soundtrack cuts and visual gags. Busch and Allen set 'em up and Covington and the cast hit 'em out of the cathedral. "Raindrops on daisies and whiskers on women...these are a few of my favorite things," purrs Covington as the secret-hiding Mother Superior.

And a superior mother she is, too.

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Photo by Linda Blase

Allison Pistorius holds court in this outdoor production.

Quick, while temps have dipped slightly below heatstroke levels, make plans to catch Shakespeare Dallas' Twelfth Night at Samuell-Grand Amphitheater. You can take a picnic or sack of snacks with you. Flop onto your blanket or low lawn chair and soak up some culture as the sun sets over cottonwood trees.

Shakespeare Dallas has been doing its thing for 41 seasons now. This summer they have Twelfth Night and Coriolanus running in rotating repertory, Tuesdays through Sundays through July 21. They'll be back in the fall with Macbeth, or as the theater peeps call it, "The Scottish Play" or "Mackers." (It's bad luck to utter the name of that play inside a theater, even an outdoor one.)

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Photo by George Wada

Jenae Yerger-Glanton and John Brumley in Crimes

Playwright and SMU grad Beth Henley won a Pulitzer for her 1981 Southern gothic comedy Crimes of the Heart. Interesting to note that the 1981 Pulitzer for fiction went to John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. It was a good year for literature about idiots in Dixie.

Crimes, now running at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, has its own cast of dunce characters in the siblings who've come back to the family home in Mississippi to help out the sister who's just shot her husband "because she didn't like his looks." Out on bail, Babe (played by Jenae Yeager-Glanton) behaves like a low-IQ child who doesn't realize she's in deep, deep dooky for pumping bullets into her spouse and then taking time to make lemonade before calling an ambulance.

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Linda Blase

Kevin Keeling and Alex Organ

Leave it to director René Moreno (profiled in this week's "People" issue) to find a way to make Coriolanus hot. For Shakespeare Dallas' first production of this rarely done bit of Bard, Moreno cast the easy-on-the-eyes (and ears) actor Alex Organ in the title role. He plays Shakespeare's lonely warrior, a career soldier who loves fighting for the rights of the Romans but can't stand the people themselves.

It's a monster role to perform, loaded with long, difficult speeches, interrupted only by other characters, mostly Roman Tribunes, delivering more long speeches about all the battlefield conquests Caius Martius Coriolanus has led. The bigwigs want him to be elected consul, but Coriolanus refuses to campaign. He even hates the smell of the citizenry's sweat, yelling "Hang 'em!" when they come too near.

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Photo by Joan Marcus

The audience-goes-crazy moments are cleverly written into the book of Jersey Boys, the long-running hit Broadway musical on view at the Winspear for three more weekends. Frankie Valli and his three pals, known as The Four Seasons, start out singing on street corners in New Jersey and work their way up in the music biz of the 1960s. They don't hit it big until Frankie meets pop composer whiz kid Bob Gaudio, who writes the tune "Sherry" and launches the group onto the charts.

"Sherry" isn't sung until halfway through the first act of Jersey Boys, but it comes at exactly the right moment. The guys playing the Four Seasons - Brad Weinstock as Frankie (except at some matinees, where Frankie's played by Hayden Milanes), Jason Kappus as Bob Gaudio, Brandon Andrus as Nick Massi and Colby Foytik as Tommy DeVito - finally launch into that four-part harmony, led by Frankie's high falsetto. "Sher-REEEEEEE, Sherry babeeeeeee!"

And the crowd goes wild.

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Photo by Joan Marcus

The audience-goes-crazy moments are cleverly written into the book of Jersey Boys, the long-running hit Broadway musical on view at the Winspear for three more weekends. Frankie Valli and his three pals, known as The Four Seasons, start out singing on street corners in New Jersey and work their way up in the music biz of the 1960s. They don't hit it big until Frankie meets pop composer whiz kid Bob Gaudio, who writes the tune "Sherry" and launches the group onto the charts.

"Sherry" isn't sung until halfway through the first act of Jersey Boys, but it comes at exactly the right moment. The guys playing the Four Seasons - Brad Weinstock as Frankie (except at some matinees, where Frankie's played by Hayden Milanes), Jason Kappus as Bob Gaudio, Brandon Andrus as Nick Massi and Colby Foytik as Tommy DeVito - finally launch into that four-part harmony, led by Frankie's high falsetto. "Sher-REEEEEEE, Sherry babeeeeeee!"

And the crowd goes wild.

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Photo by Jeffrey Schmidt

Cameron Cobb, making Old Hickory all sexypants.

Dallas actor Cameron Cobb played Hamlet in 100-degree heat in Samuell-Grand Park last summer for Shakespeare Dallas. He portrayed numerous roles, male and female, in Kitchen Dog's excellent two-hander The Turn of the Screw this spring. Now it's his manifest destiny to occupy the title role in Theatre Three's rude and raucous musical Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson.

It's a bizarre, angry, funny, balls-out rock musical based on facts about American history, the seventh president and what he did to the people who lived on this continent before the Mayflower brought white folks to it. Full of intentionally anachronistic references to the "Occupy" movement, the Tea Party (the one with Joe the Plumber, not the earlier one in Boston Harbor) and certain maverick-y presidential candidates of the recent past, the show wraps it all in a throttle-up emo style that fits Cobb right down to his black-polished fingernails.

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Photo by Michael C. Foster

Hayden Clifton leads the boys in a dance. You know, how cowboys do...

Nobody does big American musicals like Lyric Stage, the Irving theater company that does only musicals and only in the biggest way possible. Their season-ender, Rodgers and Hammerstein's 70-year-old classic Oklahoma!, brings the show back to where it started, with all the usually omitted songs back in place, 30 singers and dancers on the Carpenter Hall stage and a 33-piece orchestra in the pit. Closing Sunday, this is a production musical lovers will be talking about for years.

It's all there now: the dream ballet (elegantly danced by Mallory Michaellann Brophy and Hayden Clifton), the big square-dance sequence mixing farmers and cowmen with their pretty partners, even the mournful solo by villainous secondary character Jud Fry (Kyle Cotton), singing about his "Lonely Room," where women never tread.

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Photo by Mark Oristano

His international flight just got grounded.

Summer is the season for light comedy at the theater and Boeing-Boeing, the farce now running at Addison's WaterTower Theatre, will have your giggle muscles going boing-boing for two solid hours of funny.

It's a 1960s play, resuscitated successfully on Broadway three years ago, about one playboy (played here by handsome Ashley Wood) and his three flight attendant fiancées. Each of the girls thinks she's his one and only. He charts their travel schedules to prevent overlaps in their overnight visits to his Parisian flat. It's a beautiful system, much admired by the guy's best bachelor friend (Andy Baldwin), who drops by for a visit and stays for the hijinks.

The friend's a rube, amazed at the idea of a high-flying love life. But when bad weather and a new fleet of faster jets threaten to bring all the "trolley dollies" (that's what Brits once called them) to Paris on the same night, the fast and furiously funny games of hide and seek begin.

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