Arts Blog

It's only the second day of July and already there's tons of news on the Broadway front. I hadn't expected anything to much to happen until the end of the summer.

But you can't keep Broadway down - not even in the soggy weather soaking New York City.

Tony award winner Hair not only topped the Billboard Broadway chart with their cast recording, but it will be the first Broadway musical to perform on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien on July 13.

At the National New Play Network's annual conference, which Kitchen Dog Theater hosted here in Dallas last month, the local pups got voted two awards. One was for a show already finished, in fact -- the rolling premiere of Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes, which headlined KDT's new play festival in May.

The big news, for us at least, is that a writer nominated by Kitchen Dog, Elaine Romero, received the annual new play commission for her piece Ponzi.

There's a famous story about the singer/songwriter James Taylor. Once, in concert, a woman in the audience started screaming "I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU."

James Taylor screamed back "It helps not to know me."

Well, I just love Joel Ferrell. But I don't know Joel Ferrell, the latest hire at the Dallas Theater Center (artistic associate- casting). I just know of his reputation........ and it's great. Something just feels right about his being at the Dallas Theater Center. Don't know why, but it does.

I hope his work there is gratifying and draws on his reputed strengths. I hear he's seasoned, knows our talent pool, knows New York, knows this business. He directs musicals AND plays, so he reallllllllllllllly knows how to read a script and cast it. This feels good. Feels right.

I don't know Joel Ferrell and I really don't plan to put him to the fire and rain test. I just know that I love this move by the Dallas Theater Center. Joel Ferrell "People I know love you. People I know love you." Congratulations DTC.

It's a real mark of how serious that mid-cities community institution, Artisan Center Theater, is about upping the ante that it has hired John Davidson as artistic director, effective Aug. 1. Wilkerson just directed a successful My Fair Lady for the company -- and that was surprise enough, since Wilkerson is hardly a community theater sort of guy.

He had been appearing on Broadway and in major national tours for years when he did a couple of guest stints in the Dallas area -- most notably playing Emile de Beque in the Dallas Theater Center's fabulous South Pacific a decade ago. Then he and his wife, a Dallas native, moved here to found a very ambitious new company about five years ago. After a production of State Fair in Grapevine that didn't get the audience it deserved, the company folded. But Wilkerson and his wife, Margaret Shafer, have made occasional local appearances, and he has been touring as one of the Three Redneck Tenors (though he's actually a baritone).

Wilkerson will be running Artisan's educational program and directing four shows a year with the company, beginning with a Mikado that holds auditions July 13 and 14.

It's odd that this comes the week that Theatre Arlington announced that it will no longer have an artistic director, with the departure of B.J. Cleveland. Artisan's future will certainly need watching.

Nobody longs for unemployment and poverty. But it's been proven that adversity and hardship can bring out creativity. The Post WWI and Great Depression era were periods of great creativity. Now we're in a new depression of sorts. Social pain of a sort we're having these days gives everyday folks something of real substance to write about, and sing about. And there's two shows going on in town that honor the hardships that create the kind of great art I'm talking about.

Matt and Kim Lyle moved to Chicago nearly a year ago, but they've stayed active with two new shows from Matt's hand at area theaters. Now they are reprising their hit The Boxer for one night only, Aug. 22, before they take it to the New York Fringe Festival. The performance will be at 8 p.m. at the Dallas Children's Theater's Rosewood Center for Family Arts. Tickets are $20 through July 10, $30 thereafter -- the show is a benefit for the Fringe trip. Call 214-334-1659. or go to www.theboxer.org.

(Photo of Jeff Swearingen and Kim Lyle by Mark Oristano)

Since the current show in Theatre Three's basement, Woody Guthrie's American Song, is set mostly in the Depression, it's appropriate that the organization is offering people who have been laid off in the current economic crisis an amazing deal. They can see the show for a nickel -- it they call and reserve a "nickel special" ticket and bring a pink slip or other proof of unemployment when they attend.

It's finally summertime. Summer means vacations and vacations mean tourism.

Tourists keep my adopted city running. Restaurants, shopping, museums and theatre all benefit from the influx of new, excited people visiting New York City. But those tourists need directions and recommendations to really enjoy all NYC has to offer without spending too much money. Most importantly, where to eat!

Since I spend most of my time hovering around the 10 block radius surrounding the Broadway theatre district, I have compiled a list of fantastic and inexpensive places to eat based on my own needs to eat and save money.

My pal, Joy Tipping, always uses the phrase "if the F5 ever hits" as if it is her own ten point scale. I know one place that better survive the F5 if it ever hits! My special strip center, my familiar, is that section on Mockingbird Lane near the Palomar Hotel.......the strip center occupied by Premiere Video and Pocket Sandwich Theater.

Nothing against Netflix or Blockbuster. I just prefer Premiere Video. Sam and Heather run the place. They've made it a kind of a haven for the arts community.

Pocket Sandwich Theater is special, too- where other theaters have companies- Pocket Sandwich Theater has a family. It's a theater with a great big heart. I was reminded of that heart on Saturday when Pocket hosted the memorial service for friend and fellow playwright, Steve Lovett.

Russ Jolly, the former Broadway actor now in business in Richardson, frequently has good stories about his days and connections in New York. (He was a prime source about Rent creator Jonathan Larson when I did a feature biography on the late composer some years ago.)

Russ worte this morning about his connection to the Woody Guthrie review now in the basement of Theatre Three, which was created by Peter Glazer:

Peter Glazer was first assistant stage manager during the original run of Big River and to my recollection called the cues during the majority of the performances. He's teaching at UC Berkeley now and has a great old Berkeley vibe. Anyway, he had me and another cast member from Big River along with two other actors do the first staged/sung-thru reading of American Song way back in 85 or 86 while we were stilling running Big River. We performed it at The Writer's Theatre which was a small company founded by Tom Fontana who was the creator of St. Elsewhere. I recently reconnected with Peter and have kept in touch with the others in the first cast Linda Kerns, Nicole Orth and Scott Wakefield, who appears on Texas stages on occasion. It's always funny for me to read about shows like this 25 years later and recall the humble origins.

(File photo of Russ Jolly from 2003, Willy Welch and Alexander Ross in Woody Guthrie's American Song by Ken Birdsell courtesy of Theatre Three)

The Lexus Broadway Series, the tour presenter for the new Winspear Opera House about to open at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts in October, is scooping its own first show. The Lincoln Center South Pacific is the first subscription item in December. But today the organization announced that it is bringing Billy Crystal's Tony Award-winning one-man show, 700 Sundays, from Nov. 17 through Nov. 22.

Crystal's tribute to his late father set the record for one-week sales for any non-musical show on Broadway back in 2005. A short tour hit some American cities and Australia. AFter a two-year hiatus, the actor-comedian is reviving the piece for a six-city tour.

It's a coup for the series and the DCPA to get a star as big as Crystal duriing its first month of regular operation. Tickets go on sale in July and will be available only to subscribers of the main Lexus Broadway Series.

(Photo by Carol Rosegg)

She knows how to make an entrance: Dame Edna hit the Bass Hall stage on Tuesday night swathed in what seemed an acre of cascading hot pink and silver ruffles, all topped by that magnificent coif of Easter-egg purple. The regular Bass Hall drapes had been replaced by purple ones, of course -- and really, you can't help but admire a woman who apparently considers purple a neutral (as do I).

The kids can do art for free and anything you buy (books for dad, hint, hint?) will benefit the Arlington Museum of Art at the 3rd Annual Kids Art Celebration at Barnes and Noble at Arlington at the Parks Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m.

Just let a cashier know that you want your purchase to benefit the Arlington Museum of Art and Barnes and Noble will make it happen.

Kids activities include:
An edible art station presented by the Children's Art Cafe where kids can create art with messy and yummy supplies

Learning how to draw caricatures from caricature artist Ty Walls

Face painting techniques from Rebecca Williams

Projects to complete and take home from UpStairs Gallery of Arlington along with information on instructional classes for kids to adults.

Bravo to real estate reporter Steve Brown for his column today on the dreary design for the Dallas Convention Center Hotel. I've been meaning to write much the same thing. This is one of the highest-visibility sites Downtown, and it will be a big building that everyone who comes to the Convention Center will see. But the initial design looks cheap and tacky.

Dallas missed another great chance to welcome visitors with good architecture in the international terminal at D/FW. What we got there is generic, colorless, utterly uninteresting. We've GOT to do better this time with the hotel.

Back to the drawing board!

Orli Shaham, who was to have played the second of two piano recitals this weekend at Collin College's John Anthony Theatre, has cancelled. But in her place, the Texas Conservatory for Young Artists has secured American pianist Spencer Myer for the 7:30 p.m. spot Saturday.

Myer gave quite sophisticated performances in the first round of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and quite a few of us were surprised that he didn't advance. He was certainly one of the initial contestants I was most interested in hearing again. (Too bad I can't hear him Saturday; I'll be at the Dallas Symphony.)

Myer's program:
Handel - Suite No. 2 in F Major, HWV 427
Copland - Piano Variations (1930)
Schubert - Four Impromptus, Op. 90
Albeniz - Iberia, Book I
Gounod/Liszt - Valse de l'opera Faust

The theater is sort of on the back side of the College, which is at 2800 E. Spring Creek Parkway in Plano. You can spot it by the stage house projecting above the rest of the complex.

Tickets are $18; discounts for students. 972-985-0392, www.tcya.org

That Myer didn't advance past the preliminary round of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition left quite a few of us scratching our

Matthew Posey subtitles his new piece "An Autopsy of Hunter S. Thompson," and that gives a pretty good sense of what the show is about. The famous "Gonzo" journalist is holed up in an L.A. motel, drinking and tripping and hallucinating. His bed morphs into a car before our eyes, so the hero can go on an imaginary road trip with a couple of hallucinated buddies and (sometimes) his estranged son. At other points, Posey as Thompson sits at a table, typing his "new journalism" Occasionally he pulls out a gun to menace others in paranoid fashion or to threaten suicide.

Like Johnny Simons at Fort Worth's Hip Pocket Theatre, Posey creates an enormous amount of new material. By my count, this is his fourth world premiere since his new Exposition Park space, Ochre House, opened last October.Also like Simons, Posey's ideas are often brilliant -- but the worst ones often don't get weeded out and the best ones sometimes don't get developed or polished.

I probably enjoyed this piece more than the two other Posey plays I've seen in the last year. I especially liked the way Ross Mackey, who also plays the son, stands in the doorway playing electric guitar for almost the whole show. Mackey's original music and sound design is quite brilliant -- the sounds are frequently surf-ish during the short first act (like his band's, Astrochrist, presumably), more psychedelic during the wilder second act.

Another impressive element is the frequent changes of tone to the whole show -- an especially dramatic switch right before the end. The use of video adds something too, though that's one of the elements that might have been developed more given more time and resources.

Of course, Posey -- a pioneer in alternative Dallas theater back in the Deep Ellum Theatre Garage days -- remains one of most hilarious and eccentric comic actors. There's more depression than laughter in this show, but it's memorable just the same. It runs through June 27.

Texas Ballet Theater announced this afternoon at the Trammell Crow Center that it has raised $2.4 million and will be out of debt for the fiscal year that ends June 30.

But no live music for the season that begins Oct. 2 in Fort Worth's Bass Performance Hall with "The Russian Masters." Debut at the Winspear Opera House of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts comes Nov. 27 with The Nutcracker. Also at the Winspear will be Romeo and Juliet (March 12-14) and The Sleeping Beauty (June 11-13).

Due to popular demand, Don Schol's moving exhibition of combat art, "Vietnam Remembrances," has been extended through July 25 at Photographs Do Not Bend, a gallery in the Design District of Dallas at 1202 Dragon Street. Schol, 67, a professor at the University of North Texas and a graduate of Jesuit High School, the University of Dallas and the University of Texas (where he received a master's degree in philosophy and art), served in Vietnam from October 1967 to April 1968 as a combat artist, helping to document the war for the U.S. Army Office of Military History. The exhibition at Photographs Do Not Bend consists of 16 wood-cut prints that Schol hopes will "grab people, make them think about what they're seeing. I want them to realize ... this could be any war." (Those who wish to buy individual prints can do so for $600 each.) My story on Schol ran on the front page of The Dallas Morning News on Sunday. Those who wish to read it and watch a video of Schol discussing his work can do so by clicking here. For more information, call 214-969-1852 or visit www.pdnbgallery.com.

Photo: Don Schol's wood-cut print Going Home.

You've had your time in the sun, Billy Elliot. Join the ranks of Spring Awakening, Jersey Boys and In the Heights. It's time to start thinking about next year's musical juggernaut.

The 2009-2010 Broadway season is upon us...and it can sing and dance. In some cases, it can shoot spiderwebs out of its wrists.

Musicals cost money and they make money. Musicals tour around the country and pour out of sound systems. If plays are the life blood of the theatre, then musicals are the muscle. Here are some of the musicals coming to Broadway this season.

Ahh, we have bid a fond farewell to the 2008-2009 Broadway season. The 2009-2010 season is at the starting gate, chomping at the bit to get moving.

In discussing the new season's offerings, I have decided to separate the plays from the musicals. As art forms they are different animals and deserve to be recognized on their own.

New plays are the life's blood of the theatre. New voices, new ideas and new stories keep the heart of Broadway beating. While revivals outnumber new works this season, there are some promising new plays set to open.