Spirited conversation and congenial laughter, give and take, sober observations and impassioned advocacy over a tasty potluck lunch at Martha Heimberg’s stately Lakewood home made two hours simply fly by. Here’s the consensus of what worked well in regional theatre since September 2009, what we critics saw of it. DALLAS-FORT WORTH THEATER CRITICS FORUM AWARD … Continue reading »
Tagged with african american repertory theater …
A Surfeit of Song: 4 Musical Ventures
If music be the food of love, cry me a river until another hundred people get off of the train…. It’s Summertime so musicals start bustin’out all over like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, which makes the livin’ less easy for busy reviewers. Another opening can be trouble with a T, but many … Continue reading »
AART’s Inspired Light: Coretta’s Song
Coretta Scott King, American peace, social justice, women’s rights, anti-apartheid and LGBT activist, author and civil rights leader, recipient of the International Gandhi Peace prize, passed away on January 30, 2006. On Feb. 7, 2006 a reverential, multi-ethnic, multi-generational crowd of over 115,000 people filed past the open coffin of Coretta Scott King, during a … Continue reading »
Speaking their truth: African American Repertory Theater
“Life is short, and it’s up to you to make it sweet.” Sadie Delany When lights come up on Having Our Say at DeSoto Corner Theatre, resident venue for African American Repertory Theater, a curious audience finds two kindly looking elderly African American women inviting it into their comfortably appointed home to share a cup … Continue reading »
My Best of Live Theater in DFW 2009
Magic on stage in the Dallas-Ft. Worth region. A wealth of creative theatrical endeavor: satisfying, dignified and quirky, heart-warming and spine-chilling, thought-provoking and side-splitting, high art to lowly farce. Performance ritual reveals truths of the human condition through magical transformation. Or we hope that happens. Here’s what wove that special magic for me this year, … Continue reading »
Waltzing A World Without Collisions: Master Harold…and the Boys
S. African playwright Athol Fugard must be one heck of an optimist. The son of an Afrikaner mother and a father of Irish Huguenot descent, he began writing plays in 1959, plays that took direct exception to the bigotry and repression of the apartheid regime ruling S. Africa at the time. After his first play … Continue reading »
2008-2009 DFW THEATRE CRITICS FORUM AWARDS
“In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.” Pauline Kael Pity the poor theatre critic. More often reviled than revered. Seen by some as an unqualified evil scourge inflicting him or her-self on innocent artists of unquestionably high principles and spreading base lies to bolster an inflated, … Continue reading »
When Lorraine Hansberry selected the line from Langston Hughes’ poem as the title of her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun she had no clue she had written one of the most important American plays of the 20th century. In fact, when the play previewed on Broadway to mixed reviews, she didn’t know if it would succeed at all, much less break so many barriers so completely…. Continue reading »
