Dallas News Blog

At the Dallas Hub Theater, founder and producer Tim Shane has kept production costs low by reusing set pieces, showcasing work from new playwrights, and driving through a blizzard with old rows of seats donated by an East Coast movie theater. You can hear from Shane in the video tour above, and read more about the theater in Elaine Liner's sidebar to this year's Best of Dallas Culture section.

We've got a handful of other videos from subjects of our Best of Dallas sidebar stories to give you a few more ways into this year's issue:
Market: Marc and Roger Andres remaking Henderson Avenue
Sports: The Lingerie Football League's Dallas Desire
Food: Low-profile chefs leading the back-to-basics cooking movement
Music: Defining the Dallas Club Sound with DJ Drop

Patrick Michels

Bill Kennedy onstage at The Majestic Friday night

​Ned Startzel was 3 years old when the new Majestic Theatre opened on Elm Street in downtown Dallas in 1921. Startzel began writing shows, performed in Vaudeville acts and fought in World War II, while Dallas's theater row rose and fell around the Majestic -- with 10 neighboring theaters downtown, at one point.

Last weekend Startzel brought his 2-year-old Spectacular Senior Follies revue to the Majestic's friendly confines, singing, dancing and -- in a carnival barker's hat and gold vest -- running through Vaudeville-style comedy routines on the same stage where Harry Houdini, Fred Astaire and Mae West once performed.

Startzel, 91, and artistic director Mark Carroll assembled a cast of singers and dancers over age 55 for the show, inspired by the elderly-only Palm Springs Follies, drawing on such local groups as the Dallas Tap Dazzlers and the Greater Dallas Rotary Chorus.

The show was a fundraiser for those groups and the Visiting Nurse Association and the Ms. Texas Senior America Pageant, and four performances last weekend included tributes to the Golden Age of Hollywood, showgirls numbers, and winking nods to the performers' ages, such as  "Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)," "I'm Gonna Live 'Til I Die," and "Young At Heart."

This slide show's got more photos including a look backstage before opening night, and a few shots from the performance.

Earlier this week, Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty announced the DTC's lineup for its inaugural season in the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, and among the list of familiar titles and newcomers, one in particular leaps off the page in a single bound: It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman. It is, after all, a brave, bold choice: The musical -- which starred Bob Holiday, Jack Cassidy and Linda Lavin -- was not a classic by any stretch. On March 29, 1966, It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman opened on Broadway, and, a mere 129 performances later, all but disappeared into the Phantom Zone and has seldom been seen since (save for a dreadful 1975 made-for-TV adaptation).

It has a decidedly Dallas connection: It's Superman was co-written by an Oak Cliff native son, writer-director Robert Benton, as he and writing partner David Newman were waiting for someone to make their screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde into a reality. (Benton and Newman would also contribute to the third draft of the Superman: The Movie screenplay in 1976.) But their version of It's Superman is not the one the Dallas Theater Center will present beginning June 18 of next year. The songs -- music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams -- will remain the same, but the book is, at this very moment, being re-written by Moriarty and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a noted playwright who's also penned Spider-man titles for Marvel Comics.

Tadd Myers

DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty

For Moriarty, who made a splash with his take on The Who's Tommy, this revival is "a very big deal" for many reasons, chief among them: "Growing up in a very small town in Indiana, two of my most favorite escapes were comic books, which you could find in rural Indiana, and musicals, which I found in record stores or at the library. I stumbled across a cast recording of It's Superman when I was 12, and I could figure out Strouse and Adams were the writers of Bye Bye Birdie, which my high school had done, and Annie, and I felt like all of my dreams had come true. Had I been able to commission a piece as a high school kid, I would have had the writers of Annie do Superman!"

Horton Foote

The great Horton Foote, the Wharton native responsible for such works as the To Kill a Mockingbird screenplay (for which he won an Oscar), The Trip to Bountiful (filmed in Dallas) and Tender Mercies, died today at the age of 92 at his Connecticut home. This excerpt from his New York Times obituary:

Although he boarded a train for Dallas at the age of 16 to pursue a career as an actor, Mr. Foote never really left home. From his first efforts as a playwright, he returned again and again to set his plays and films amid the pecan groves and Victorian houses with large front porches on the tree-lined streets of Wharton. His inspiration came from the people he knew and the stories he heard growing up there. "I've spent my life listening," Mr. Foote once said.

Now, perhaps, would be a very good time to visit the DeGolyer Library on the SMU campus, where the Horton Foote Collection is kept -- with "close to 200 boxes of material [including] manuscripts, scrapbooks, handwritten drafts of screenplays, diaries, letters, photographs, and family memorabilia of the Wharton, Texas, native who has spent over 60 years in film, stage, and television." Six years ago, in fact, the DeGolyer Library mounted the exhibition "Horton Foote and The Trip to Bountiful, 1953-2003."

Jeremy Gerard, a theater critic for The Dallas Morning News some two decades ago, is now a New York-based editor for Bloomberg News, the first media outlet to which George Steel denied he was leaving his new Dallas Opera gig for an opening in New York. This morning, Gerard weighs in on Steel's abrupt departure from Dallas last week, insisting, as others have in recent days, that Steel had already worn out his welcome here and that it was probably best he return to Manhattan. Which isn't the part of the piece I find most interesting, truth told. This is:

Like Steel, I know something about being a New Yorker in Dallas. It can be a silly city. It has skyscrapers outlined in green neon. It's deeply obsessed with how the rest of the world sees it.

Yet its self-confidence can be infectious. Tennessee Williams found refuge and solace there. Margo Jones practically invented theater-in-the-round on the same Texas State Fair grounds as the opera and guitarist Charlie Christian played electric jazz in the speakeasies of the Deep Ellum district. You just have to show a little curiosity to find the there there.

Translating live improv comedy to the page is tough, so for a companion to our cover story this week about Mark Orvik, a comedian who's fighting a life-threatening illness with humor, check out these videos of the troupe's on-stage shenanigans. And hey, amidst waves of layoffs and foreclosures, we could all stand to follow Orvik's lead and use humor as a coping tool.
     

The top story in today's Hollywood Reporter billboards the cast of the new Sci Fi Channel series Stargate Universe, third in the Stargate franchise. Starring opposite Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty, Trainspotting) is Brian J. Smith, a young actor we've been writing about (OK, gushing over) since he wowed critics and audiences in A Clockwork Orange at Collin County Community College's Quad C Theatre in 2002.

Smith, pictured here, is one of the four leads on the show. He'll play Lt. Matthew Scott, a junior member of the Stargate team "thrust into the role before he's ready." (The character, not the actor.) The series, yet another based on the 15-year-old movie starring Kurt Russell, follows a group of soldiers, scientists and civilians left to fend for themselves after being forced through a Stargate (a sort of time portal/black hole) after their base is attacked. The survivors are led by Dr. David Rush (Carlyle), who takes charge of trying to unlock the ship's mysteries and return the group to Earth. The show will debut in the fall as a two-hour movie on Sci Fi.

"I think this is going to be a pretty cool project," writes Smith via Facebook. "There's been a lot of criticism of the show already, and it hasn't even been SHOT yet. A lot of the fans of SG1 and Stargate: Atlantis were appalled at the cast breakdown, calling it Stargate: 90210 based on some of the character's ages (mid-20s)."  Smith, 27, actually is the second youngest of the cast so far.

How do you freak out a serious stage actor? Ask him or her to do some improv. On video.

That's what we did with members of the new Dallas Theater Center resident acting company. After we conducted the serious interviews about being ack-tohrs in big-time regional theater, we made them act on command. Such whining. "They made us feel like dancing monkeys!" the thesps complained later to DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty (or so we heard).

Look, even James Lipton gets his subjects to tap-dance on Inside the Actors Studio. So what's wrong with goofing around a little? Seven of the nine actors gave it a go. Do jump along. --Elaine Liner

The next production at the Dallas Theater Center, In the Beginning (opening January 21), also marks the start of a new era for actors at the 50-year-old playhouse. It will be the first production to star all of the members of artistic director Kevin Moriarty's new nine-member resident acting company: Hassan El-Amin, Chamblee Ferguson, Matthew Gray, Sean Hennigan, Liz Mikel, Cedric Neal, Sally Nystuen Vahle, Lee Trull and Christina Vela.

DTC hasn't had a resident ensemble since the early 1990s. Resident companies are a rarity in regional theater these days. Theater biz is hurting so badly, some are trimming their seasons and booking cheap-to-produce two- and three-character plays. Addison's WaterTower Theatre informed subscribers this week that it was reducing runs from four weeks to three and canceling upcoming productions of Our Town and How to Succeed in Business..., replacing them with The Glass Menagerie and another small-cast show to be named later in the season.

Good news for nostalgists with kiddos: The Electric Company makes its return to PBS January 19th, when the network sneak peeks the easy-reader with a two-hour marathon in advance of its official January 23 debut. Alas, no Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno or Bill Cosby this go-round, but says the media release we received this a.m., there is a local on the show: William Jackson Harper, familiar to patrons of the Dallas Theater Center, the Courtyard Theater and Dallas Shakespeare Festival. The 28-year-old also has a lengthy off-Broadway résumé, including, recently, Queens Boulevard (The Musical).

Harper's character's name on the show is Danny Rebus, described thusly in the media release: He "leaves riddles in rebus form, creating havoc within the neighborhood and the people in it. He is super touchy and offended by the most innocuous perceived transgression. His good traits are that he's a whiner, a grudge-holder and an all around bitter pill." To which I can totally re-late, relate. --Robert Wilonsky