Via.

​As I've noted a few times, Mike Shropshire's Seasons in Hell, about the "worst team in baseball history" (the '73-'75 Texas Rangers), is my favorite sports book; probably has something to do with being raised on the '73-'75 Texas Rangers. Anyway.

On a very related note, a Friend of Unfair Park sends word: On Thursday Stage West in Fort Worth will debut Dallas playwright Larry Herold's latest, The Sports Page, set during Dallas Cowboys training camp in 1966. As Herold writes, he's been workshopping the piece for two years, and it's about "a young man desperate to be a big-time sportswriter [as he] heads for a showdown with a couple of crusty scribes, an attractive female TV reporter and a player who refuses to speak to the press."

To market the piece, says our Friend, Stage West has cut a series of chitchats with Shropshire as he recounts, among other things, boozin' it up on the sports beat during The Good Ol' Days and how the modern-day scribe's too buttoned-up and not havin' any damned fun. The whole collection follows, including the fifth and latest clip, which contains a very casually dropped bombshell about the first woman ever let into the Rangers' locker room in '75. Shropshire goes on to talk about the subsequent rise of the "talking doll" (as he refers to female sports journalists) and reveals how little has changed amongst some of the old guard.More >>

The great Will Clarke hipped us to this sneak peek at Breaking Bad, which returns Sunday at 9 p.m. on AMC. The reason Will's so excited: The above clip features none other than Kitchen Dog Theater's co-artistic director Tina Parker, who's had bit parts on the meth-addled thriller since its second season as scumbag attorney Saul Goodman's assistant. "Which is its own pile of awesome," she says, "because I've idolized Bob Odenkirk since Mr. Show."

Turns out, though, Parker's bit part is a bit bigger this year: She says she's in four episodes this season -- five, if you count the one in which she's heard but not seen.

"And it's so fun," she says. "It's one of those shows I admired from the beginning. If they said, 'Would you come open the door for Bryan Cranston so he can have an amazing scene, I'd be, like, 'Sure, what time do you need me?' Everyone who works on that show is so nice and really good at their jobs. It's one of those jobs I love. I'm like, 'Please don't kill my boss, please don't kill my boss.' Because you only get your part when they give you the script, since they don't want fans to get hold of the scripts. Plus, I don't want to know."

If nothing else, getting an extended run on Breaking Bad's a pleasant change from Parker's recent run on TV: She appeared on all three series that shot here last year (The Good Guys, Lone Star and Chase), but her Chase ep was among those NBC burned off after the series was canceled, and she was on the third episode of Lone Star -- which sucked, because only the two ever aired. "See," Parker says of her now-recurring role on Breaking Bad, "I'm not a curse after all."

Steven Walters

​Having trouble getting cast in shows as a young actor new to Dallas eight years ago, Steven Walters made a bold move: He started his own theater company (with the help of four other fellow Baylor alums) and hasn't stopped working since. Second Thought Theatre, based in Addison and now in its eighth season, is one of the best small companies in the area, and Best of Dallas-winner Walters, now the only remaining founding member, boasts a résumé that includes acting, directing, screenwriting and playwriting, TV and film work, notably as a recurring character on two seasons of NBC's Friday Night Lights (he played guidance counselor Glenn Reed).

Now Walters has just been named the tenth member of the Brierly Resident Acting Company at Dallas Theater Center. In the announcement today, DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty praised Walters, an Equity member who's already been featured in several DTC productions, as "a dynamic presence on our stage, a valued collaborator, a generous spirit and an all around great guy." As a company member, Walters will perform in several productions next season (good guess is that he'll have a lead role in the season opener, The Tempest) and teach in DTC's collaboration with Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Walters, 29, was raised in Fort Worth and graduated from Baylor in 2003. We've watched him grow up on local stages, from gangly comic presence to handsome, confident leading man (he was terrific as Prince Hal in DTC's Henry IV last fall). At the Uptown Starbucks the other day, and in some follow-up e-mails after that, we asked Walters what advice he'd offer to young thesps trying to break into the biz.More >>

Photo by Elaine Liner

Horton Foote Jr. and siblings Hallie, Daisy and Walter celebrated what would've been their dad's 95th birthday at a party in the Winspear lobby Monday.

​Monday, on what would have been their father's 95th birthday, the four children of Pulitzer- and two-time Academy Award-winning playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote celebrated the launch of the area-wide festival of his work at a party in the lobby of the Winspear Opera House. Actors and directors from many of the Foote productions that will open over the next few weeks at theaters in Dallas and Fort Worth toasted the memory of Horton Foote and buzzed about the festival, which will feature more than a dozen stage productions, screenings of films Foote wrote and an exhibit of his handwritten scripts at SMU's DeGolyer Library.

Among the guests at the Foote fete: Jim Covault, director of Talking Pictures, now playing at Fort Worth's Stage West; Joel Ferrell, directing Dividing the Estate at Dallas Theater Center, opening this Friday; Marianne Galloway, directing Foote's Pulitzer-winning drama The Young Man from Atlanta for Uptown Players, opening April 1; Terry Dobson, directing The Roads to Home for Theatre Three, opening April 7; and René Moreno, directing The Trip to Bountiful at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, opening April 8. Plus cast members from all those shows and others.

In a lively pre-party Q&A session moderated by Art & Seek drama critic Jerome Weeks, the four Footes -- Daisy, also a playwright; Walter, a lawyer-turned-screenwriter; Horton Jr., actor and restaurateur; and actress Hallie -- shared stories about their dad, who won his Oscars for writing the films To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983). In the two decades between the awards, Foote moved his family to a small town in New Hampshire, where, Daisy recalled, hardly anyone knew who he was or what he did for a living.

"He wrote every day. It was like prayer to him really," said Daisy, who at 51 is the youngest of Foote's children. "He'd get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and start writing and not stop. When I'd come in from school with my friends, he'd come downstairs in his pajamas. He'd never gotten out of his pajamas. Because of that, a lot of people around town thought he was an alcoholic. Of course, he never drank. But they just had no idea. I was always so embarrassed. 'Why can't you be like other dads?' You know."More >>

Elaine Liner

DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty describes what he's looking for in the actress to play the Elizabeth Taylor character in Giant.

Dallas Theater Center's artistic director Kevin Moriarty announced the company's 53rd season of shows today, and it includes a couple of giant productions -- including Giant, the much-anticipated new musical by Michael John LaChiusa (book by Sybille Pearson) based on the 1952 Edna Ferber novel. The season features four regional premieres, three comedies, two classic novels adapted for the stage, a Shakespeare and the big musical. Three shows will happen at the Kalita Humphreys Theater on Turtle Creek, the rest at the Wyly Theatre downtown.

The whole line-up follows, complete with a video sneak peek starring Moriarty. More >>

Robert Wuhl

​Robert Wuhl is bringing his solo show Assume the Position to the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at WaterTower Theatre in Addison next week. The two-week festival opens tomorrow with a lineup of more than 20 different performances of drama, dance, music and comedy. It's an enjoyably freewheeling theater event every March, with shows running three at a time in all the venues at WaterTower.

Wuhl, 59, created and starred in HBO's Arli$$ series, in which he played a sports agent; of course, he also had fast-talking roles in a couple of sports-related movies, Bull Durham (as the chattering dugout coach) and Ty Cobb (as the ball player's biographer). In January, Wuhl debuted on 40 Westwood One radio stations as host of a daily three-hour talk show focused (sometimes) on sports.

Good sport that he is, Wuhl gave us some phone-chat time to talk about Assume the Position, writing jokes for Billy Crystal at the Oscars and how pop culture has screwed up our knowledge of history (which happens to be the the basis of his one-man show). More >>

Danny Fulgencio

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, playwright and Big Love staff writer, at the Dallas Theater Center during Superman rehearsals last year

​Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark hasn't officially opened yet on Broadway; due date's still a month away. Still, it's considered The Most Amazing, Spectacular Failure of All-Time -- a horribly told, injury-plagued, critically despised mess of a musical laid at the feet of writers Julie Taymor (also the director) and Glen Berger and U2's Bono and The Edge, who are responsible for the songs. But this morning, Variety notes that a storyline savior's on his way to save the day, quite possibly -- and it's the very same man Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty tapped to help him completely retool the 1966 Broadway bust It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman!

It's none other than Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the Big Love writer who's already had stints on Fantastic Four and Spider-Man titles at Marvel and who spent much of '09 and '10 flying between Dallas and L.A. to put a new shine on the Man of Steel. The trade says no deal's in place, but that it's "likely." Funny thing is: Moriarty and Aguirre-Sacasa -- along with Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who added new songs to DTC's revisal -- always saw their Superman (which Elaine loved) as its own Broadway contender (though, inexplicably,. DC Comics wasn't particularly warm to that idea).

They also eyed Broadway's Spider-Man as competition, wanting to prove, if nothing else, that they could do more with less down in Dallas. As Strouse told me in May, "The most expensive show dreamed of is Spider-Man. So it's really a battle -- in our minds, at least -- between the giants. And we know who's going to win. Nobody beats Superman, and nobody ever will."

Michael Kahn

​Dallas Opera's Romeo & Juliet opens tonight at the Winspear. Staging the piece by Charles Gounod (sung in French with English supertitles) is Michael Kahn, the highly respected Shakespeare expert from the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where he's brought the works of the Bard to audiences for 25 seasons. A winner of six Helen Hayes directing awards, Kahn has a special affinity for Shakespeare's best romantic tragedy.

It was the first play he directed at Shakespeare Theatre a quarter century ago, and it's one he says still has relevance to modern audiences in its story of star-crossed teenage lovers from feuding families. One message in the play and opera, he says, is: "Parents don't always know what their kids are doing."

Between rehearsals at the Winspear, Kahn gabbed about Shakespeare, the missing elements he put back into the opera to make it all make sense and what he thinks of GOP attitudes toward eliminating funding for the arts. That interview -- along with two sneak peeks at the opera, filmed during dress rehearsal -- is after the jump. More >>

​Back in April we learned that New York's Public Theater and the Dallas Theater Center would team up to present Michael John LaChuisa and Sybille Pearson's potentially very-big-deal musical-theater adaptation of Giant, which, befitting so mammoth a novel, ran around four hours during its '09 debut at the Signature Theater in Arlington, Virginia. But there was little else to say nine months ago; all the DTC knew then was that Leslie Benedict and Jett Rink wouldn't grace the local stage till the 2011-'12 season, which won't be announced for a few more months.

But this afternoon, The New York Times offers an update: Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public, tells Patrick Healy they're presently workshopping the piece -- and have thus far trimmed about an hour from the monster musical, which is very good news. And right now, at least, Michael Greif is directing -- and he's the same guy responsible for the original Broadway production of Rent. As for when it'll debut in Dallas -- "next winter." And then? "How fast we'll go from Dallas to New York City depends on how much progress we make on the show between now and then," Eustis tells The Times. Till then, then, a sneak peek from the '09 production follows on the other side.More >>

Paul Kolnik

Boyd as The Monster, with Christopher Ryan as Frederick Frankenstein, in Young Frankenstein at the Winspear

​"It isn't easy being green," sang Kermit the Frog. For actor Preston Truman Boyd, starring as the mad doctor's stitched-together Monster in the Broadway tour of Mel Brooks' musical comedy Young Frankenstein playing at the Winspear Opera House through January 23, being green isn't the half of it. He also wears a special foam and latex headpiece, crisscrossed with fake sutures, to make his green head look bald, plus layers of heavy padding on his arms and shoulders, and shoes with built-up soles to make him about 7 feet tall. He tap-dances in them in the show-stopping "Puttin' on the Ritz" number with star Christopher Ryan as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein.

Let's meet The Monster in a monstrously funny show.

Just out of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Boyd did a summer on the CBS soap The Guiding Light just before it went off the air and he was repeatedly called back for the role of Finn, the singing football star on Fox's Glee (the part, of course, went to Cory Monteith). Boyd was cast in the tour of Young Frankenstein first as an ensemble member, playing several small roles. Director-choreographer Susan Stroman moved him into the dance line and then pegged him as understudy for The Monster behind actor Shuler Hensley, who originated the part on Broadway production and did 10 months on the road. Boyd became The Monster full time last August. Though critics haven't exactly heaped raves on the show (I buck that trend, as you'll see when my review runs next week), Boyd has consistently gotten good notices, including one from a critic who noted that Boyd "was thoroughly convincing as the Creature." (Think about it.)

Under makeup the same shade as the gunk used to greenify Elphaba in Wicked and the title ogre in Shrek, Boyd, 25, is a fresh-faced blond whose complexion shows only a few red splotches from the harsh chemicals used to attach the special Monster effects to his head and neck eight times a week. Over lunch at the Screen Door at One Arts Plaza up the hill from the Winspear, the actor indulged our curiosity about his life on the road in a big Broadway tour. More >>