It’s all meant to hype Smash,, which looks to be the ‘adult Glee. Still, 20 schools across the country will get a pilot musical theater program out of it, including one in Dallas. Your school can apply for the expansion program for the fall.
Give It Up! finally gives it up — after two months on Broadway as Lysistrata Jones. The good news? We’ll probably have Liz Mikel back.
Composer Michael John LaChiusa is having a big year — working on Giant, which opens in January at the Dallas Theater Center — and debuting another musical in New York. Which brings up some interesting speculations.
The musical Rags has a gorgeous score with a big story: the wave of desperate Jewish immigrants coming to New York around 1910. There are big Broadway names (Charles Strouse of Annie, Joseph Stein of Fiddler, and the Lyric Stage show has big voices. Too bad the results feel … small.
The basketball-playing cast of Lysistrata Jones — known when it played the Dallas Theater Center as Give It Up! — needed some coaching in the fine craft of layups and dunks. So they all visited with a retired NBA all-star.
The past 18 months have seen Dallas performer Liz Mikel lose her apartment, lose her belongings and lose her mother. On the plus side, in the midst of such troubles, her art helped her, helped her express her anguish — and helped pull her around, full circle.
For your roundup this morning, we are serving a profile of the new Fort Worth Symphony CEO, a Porgy and Bess feature and the woman who made The Last Picture Show look as good as it did.
‘The Wiz’ is the first collaboration between the Dallas Theater Center and the Dallas Black Dance Theatre. It’s also the only production of ‘The Wiz’ to take some theatergoers on a trip to Oz, courtesy of director Kevin Moriarty’s movable audience sections. OK, so how does a choreographer deal with a stage that won’t stand still?
Last year, ‘Next to Normal’ was only the 8th musical ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Now Uptown Players is presenting the local premiere — the musical has its faults, but this is a powerhouse production, almost a mini-opera in its intensity.
The tour of ‘Billy Elliot’ is at the Winspear. The affecting film about a mining-town boy defying his father to dance has become a big, Tony-winning Broadway musical — with all the advantages and disadvantages.
