Blogs

OMFG, the OMSW is coming to WaterTower Theatre. Canadian actor Charles Ross has been performing his One-Man Star Wars Trilogy since 2001. With George Lucas’ stamp of approval, he has taken the show to off-Broadway success (in 2005) and toured it across the continent. It will be the main feature, starring Ross, at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre for five performances next March at the annual Out of the Loop Fringe Festival.

Here’s a look at Ross in character(s). The clip is kinda dark, like deep space. Note that the actor also sings the soundtrack music.

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Lee Trull

For a freelance actor-writer, being hired for the new resident company at Dallas Theater Center is like being called up from the minors to the big leagues. And for all-around utility player Lee Trull, it also means being the first Dallas actor to be named to the nine-member troupe.

DTC today appointed Trull, 28, to the newly created position of Associate Artist. He’ll play three positions: local casting director for DTC productions; literary manager; and member of the new acting company, putting him onstage in at least two main stage shows each season. Before we jump for more, first, this is Trull in a trailer for the indie horror film Night Crawlers.

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“By us, for us,” said Dallas Theater Center Artistic Director Kevin Moriarty at Monday night’s announcement of the theater’s 50th season programming. The 41-year-old Moriarty -- who sat for an exclusive video interview with Unfair Park that's above -- has spent lots of time and energy since he arrived on the job at DTC in September visiting area theaters, churches, community centers and schools, asking what DTC should be doing better. What he heard, he says, is that people want theater that feels locally grown, not always imported from the East or West Coasts.

Wow, a Dallas Theater Center for Dallas audiences with Dallas actors -- not just Juilliard and Yale hired guns. Good concept.

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From Lyric Stage's production of Carousel last fall

Could it be? Yes, it could. Something’s coming, something good.

To Lyric Stage, that is. Big musicals on a small budget are what the 16-year-old musical theater company in Irving does best. But its 2008-'09 season lineup, announced today by company founder-producer Steven Jones, heralds two huge shows that will be performed with full orchestras. “Our biggest season yet,” says Jones in today’s press release.

Lyric is getting a much-needed boost in bucks from a National Endowment for the Arts grant. The money will pay for a full 30-piece orchestra for a two-week run in June 2009 of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, featuring the original Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations used for the 1951 Broadway premiere. Last season’s $30,000 NEA grant paid for a full pit orchestra for Lyric’s Carousel, which wowed critics and audiences last September.

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Richard III -- he’s the one with the hump, right? The hump and the attitude. Not a happy guy for sure. But a surprisingly funny king, even in one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest plays.

Kitchen Dog Theater likes to shake up their Shakespeare. For their new production of Richard III, opening a five-week run beginning tomorrow, they’ve cut an hour out of the script (thank you!) and built a “steam-punk” set in the small black box theater. They’ve also cast a director in the lead and let one of KDT’s leading actors, Ian Leson, do the directing.

Much more after the jump -- including video from rehearsals, an Unfair Park exclusive.

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Kris Andersson as his more profitable persona, Dixie Longate

About six years ago, Los Angeles actor Kris Andersson donned a gingham dress, a blue apron, a red wig and size 10 heels and started peddling Tupperware as the character Dixie Longate. His R-rated selling parties evolved into a stage show that was a hit in L.A. and off-Broadway. Before launching a four-year national tour, he brings Dixie's Tupperware Party to the Out of the Loop Festival at Addison's WaterTower Theatre for four performances starting tonight. (And, yes, winter weather be damned, the show must go on.)

The 90-minute show, written with Elizabeth Meriwether, is big on audience interaction. Dixie drags people onstage for games, door prizes and other silliness. She calls everybody "hooker," so don't take it personally. After a curtain call, Dixie heads to the lobby to take orders for what she calls "great plastic crap" for real. Average Tupperware orders per show: $1,400. Dixie's total sales last year: Way, way more than we make.

Yesterday we found Andersson already in character and setting up shop for a run-through on the main stage at WaterTower. And because typing about a drag queen with a Gomer Pyle drawl doesn't do her justice, we brought along our video camera. The footage is after the jump. --Elaine Liner

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A month ago we mentioned that Neil Young's Greendale, already an album and movie, would be getting the stage treatment, courtesy the Undermain Theatre via a special partnership with Wixen Music Publishing. The production, a world premiere, previews at the Undermain March 26-28, then runs March 29 through May 3, and today the Undermain announced the musicians who'll make up the band performing during the show: New Bohemians guitarist Kenny Withrow, former Course of Empire bassist Paul Semrad and Brave Combo drummer Alan Emert. Sounds terrific, though I was kind of expecting someone from the late, great Slobberbone. --Robert Wilonsky

Big or small, whatever show she’s in, M. Denise Lee manages to make it feel like an event. The Dallas theater and cabaret star is known as one of the area’s top “divas,” but only because she can belt a song like nobody’s business. There’s nothing diva-esque about Lee’s personality (humble) or her work ethic (tireless). Theater professionals love sharing a stage with her. Theatergoers love watching her.

You may have seen her onstage last month as Mrs. Fezziwig in Dallas Theater Center’s sold-out run of A Christmas Carol. She was featured last year in a series of funny Texas Lottery commercials. And if you’ve sat through Mad Money, she’s one of the brighter spots in it, playing the cynical interviewer telling Diane Keaton that her job qualifications are lousy. (Actually, even Lee’s sharp performance isn’t enough to justify going to that tepid caper-comedy co-starring Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes. So here’s a shortcut to Lee’s scene with Keaton: Go to the movie’s Web site, click on “Character profiles,” click on Keaton’s face, then click on “clip.” That’s Lee scowling across the desk at the Oscar-winner.)

Next up for Denise Lee is the one-woman bio-musical Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill at the Contemporary Theatre of Dallas; of course, it's about legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday, and it opens tonight. After the jump, exclusive video from dress rehearsals.

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Farewell My Concubine is a familiar love story in China. It’s been a poem, a novel and an Oscar-nominated 1993 film. Now it’s also a 90-minute Western-style opera (sung in Mandarin with English subtitles), and it’s coming from China to Richardson’s Eisemann Center with its original 130-member cast and orchestra February 5 and 6.

Shanghai-born Dallas millionaire Emily Kuo Vong saw the production by the China National Opera House last year and decided to produce and finance a six-city American tour. Vong, founder and chairman of a Dallas-based non-profit group promoting cultural exchanges between China and the U.S., is a graduate of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Xiao Bai, the composer of Farewell My Concubine.

Vong and Run Yu Qun, the 25-year-old beauty who sings a starring role in the opera, previewed the show for the Dallas press this week. Good thing we brought our video camera -- after the jump, course. --Elaine Liner

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It was a done deal about a month ago, but both Neil Young and the Undermain Theatre's Web sites have the just-released official announcement: In March, the Undermain will world premiere a stage production of Young's Greendale, based on his 2003 album that spawned the most head-scratching concert tour of Young's occasionally quixotic career. Nutty movie too, though not without its formidable fans.

Greendale -- a "song cycle that has been compared to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg Ohio as a portrait of the changing face of small town America," says the Undermain's media release -- is the project Young won't drop, seems like. Not only it is getting the Undermain treatment, but also the comic-book redo, courtesy DC Comics' adult imprint, Vertigo. Greendale previews at the Undermain March 26-28, then runs March 29 through May 3. No word whether Young will attend the premiere -- though according to his tour schedule, he's free after a March 15 show in London ... --Robert Wilonsky

Victoria Clark, in the role that won her a Tony two years ago

Hockadaisy Victoria Clark gets a rave today in The New York Times, following her Monday-night performance at Lincoln Center's Kaplan Penthouse. Clark, a Yale University grad in 1982 who made her Broadway bow three years later in Sunday in the Park With George, has estimable credits, among them appearances in the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying that also starred Matthew Broderick and Megan Mullally, the Tony Award-winning revival of Guys and Dolls and director Sam Mendes’ astounding reworking of Cabaret.

Writes Stephen Holden of Clark's performance: "Although fortified by a fancy music-theater education that carried her to Austria to study opera, fundamental true grit that smacks of her hometown, Dallas, seeps through her impeccable musical training." The 2005 Tony Award-winner, for the musical The Light in the Piazza, has just released her first album, Fifteen Seconds of Grace. --Robert Wilonsky

Must we really wait almost a year for The Facts of Life: The Lost Episode? ’Fraid so, theater lovers. But mark your calendar now for June 13, 2008, when Uptown Players present the local premiere (at the Rose Room at Station 4) of Jamie Morris’ all-drag and totally unauthorized parody of the oddly popular 1980s sitcom about teenage girls in the Eastland Academy boarding school.

The stage show, a bonus offering on Uptown’s 2008 season, “finds” FoL’s fictional lost episode in which the girls turn to prostitution to offset budget cuts and save headmistress Mrs. Garrett’s job. (Start the campaign now for Dallas actor B.J. Cleveland, a master at acting like a miss, to play the show’s resident wisecracking chubbess, Natalie Green. Nobody -- nobody --else could do justice to that role.)

Facts falls toward the end of what looks to be a challenging (in a good way) season for Uptown Players, a company that’s found great success doing mostly gay-themed comedies, dramas and musicals for a mostly gay audience.

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Every year, the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park goes searching for a new play upon which to bestow its Macy's New Play Prize for Young Audiences. The winner get a $5,000 commission fee and gets to travel to Cincy a few times during the year to prep the play for a tour. And this year's winner has some substantial local ties: It's Melissa Cooper, whose adaptation of Euripides' Medea took home the top prize. Cooper's version, incidentlally, is called Little Medea, which kind of makes it sound like it should star little kids pretending to be grown-up Greeks -- like, ya know, Bugsy Malone, maybe?

Local theatergoers will, of course, recall Cooper as the former artistic associate at the Dallas Theater Center. She was the co-founder, producer and curator of the Big D Festival of the Unexpected, and during her 15-year run at DTC she wrote and directed many of its more out-there productions, among them last year's celebrated A Macbeth. Cooper's also married to Richard Hamburger, DTC's artistic director till his abrupt resignation announcement last August. --Robert Wilonsky

A solid hit: Bootstraps Comedy Theater's The Boxer lands some good ones at the Festival of Independent Theatres. Great poster too.

The less said, the better The Boxer is. The new play by Dallas writer and Bootstraps Comedy Theater founder Matt Lyles, who also directs this production, is a clear audience favorite at the current Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center. Its brilliance lies in how it manages to say things worth saying about the delicate use of low comedy to make high art and how to graft pathos onto humor --and it says it all without any actor uttering a word.

Inspired by the silent film comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lyles spent two weeks writing 13 pages of detailed stage directions for a story about a pretty girl named Velma (played by Kim Lyle, Matt’s wife) who must masquerade as a man to earn Depression-era wages. After a chance meeting with an up-and-coming lightweight (Jeff Swearingen), Velma, still in man-drag, turns fight trainer for his big bout with the fearsome Bavarian Beast (Ben Bryant).

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A missing page in the Playbill for Spamalot, the Broadway tour currently playing at the Music Hall at Fair Park, has fueled a ferocious little fuss among the free magazine’s publisher, the Dallas Summer Musicals and Irving’s Lyric Stage.

Lyric’s founder and artist director, Steven Jones, bought a full-page ad in the Playbill to announce his company’s new season lineup. Lyric is a small local theater company that stages four musicals a year at the Irving Arts Center using singers, actors and musicians who work almost for free. Their next season begins in September with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.

Jones says he sent Playbill, based in Florida, a check for $5,400 dollars more than a month ago to pay for the ad space. He also says he approved the layout of the ad, which was supposed to go on a right-facing page in the publication during the run of Spamalot. As an advertiser Jones also was granted a couple of opening-night tickets to the big-budget musical. But he had auditions to attend to this past Tuesday and switched the tix to Wednesday.

But by the time he got to Fair Park to see the show, he’d already heard from theater pals that his ad wasn’t in the program. He says he was even more surprised to discover that the page his ad had been printed on had been sliced out of each copy of Playbill handed to Spamalot theatergoers. Well, almost every copy: At intermission, Jones found a box of Playbills at one entrance that hadn’t been scissored. There was his ad, just as he’d approved it, opposite the page listing the cast of characters in the Monty Python-inspired musical.

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