Season Announcement

Dallas' Theatre Three invites patrons back home for 60th season in 2022

The musical Next to Normal closes out the 2022-23 season.

Photo by Joan Marcus

After a couple years of traveling shows, virtual productions, construction-related closures, and a pandemic, Theatre Three is celebrating six decades of creating theater with an all-new season that will take place "back home" at the Norma Young Arena Stage in the Quadrangle.

"Theatre Three, founded in 1961, is celebrating its 60th season. Let that sink in," says artistic director Jeffrey Schmidt. "We are part of the fabric of Dallas arts and culture. Uptown grew up around us. We were and are integral to the success of one of the most vibrant and lucrative neighborhoods in the country. As the Quadrangle, our home, receives a much needed transformation, Theatre Three continues to do what it does best with its sights set on the future and a nod to the past."

Opening the season five years after its wildly popular production downstairs in Theatre Too is Matt Lyle's Big Scary Animals. An older white couple from the country moves to the city to be closer to their granddaughter and unknowingly settles in the gay neighborhood. What begins as polite dinner conversation with their gay, multi-ethnic neighbors careens out of control. It runs September 1-25, 2022.

Next up is Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan's hilarious musical Young Frankenstein, in partnership with Fort Worth's Circle Theatre and directed by Joel Ferrell with music direction by Cody Dry. When the grandson of the infamous Victor Frankenstein, Frederick Frankenstein, inherits his family's estate, his mad scientist genes come to fruition. With the help of his assistant, Igor, he brings a monster to life and hilarity ensues. Includes such memorable tunes as "The Transylvania Mania," "Don't Touch Me," and "Puttin' on the Ritz." It runs October 13-November 13, 2022.

The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance follows, directed by Schmidt (this was originally scheduled for April 2020). John Merrick, an intelligent and friendly man shunned by Victorian-era society and called a "freak" due to his skin and bone disorders, is found abandoned. Under the care of physician Frederick Treves, Merrick begins to slowly evolve from an object of pity to an urbane and witty favorite of the aristocracy and literati, only to be denied his ultimate dream: to become a man like any other. It runs January 19-February 19, 2023.

The regional premiere of the English translation by Dante Flores of Federico García Lorca's The Butterfly's Evil Spell is next, also directed by Schmidt. In a whimsical world of beetles, scorpions, and bugs of all sorts, a beetle falls in love with an injured butterfly. An "insect comedy" written in verse, The Butterfly's Evil Spell is a story about unrequited love in a "green and humble meadow" covered in dewdrops and dripping in poetry. It runs April 6-30, 2023.

Closing the 60th anniversary season is the emotionally charged rock musical Next to Normal, directed by Christie Vela with music direction by Vonda K. Bowling. The Goodman family is just a "normal" family: Dad's an architect, mom packs lunches and makes birthday cakes, and their daughter and son are bright, wise-cracking teens. Under the surface, their family is anything but. Next to Normal explores a family's raw and emotional journey with a mother struggling with chronic bipolar disorder as they navigate a world of therapists and medication. It runs June 1-July 7, 2023.

"I'm thrilled to be bringing this eclectic mix to Theatre Three audiences," says associate artistic director Christie Vela. "These are some of my favorite newer, well-known shows intermingled with an obscure classic that we're breathing new life into. These shows will be a feast for the senses."

The Monday Night Playwright series will continue, offering an affordable and accessible venue for new works by local writers.

Theatre Three also plans to continue the T3 Translates initiative, where a commissioned writer will translate a play that doesn't have an English translation, ending with a staged reading.

The Festival of Bad Ideas will also return in the summer of 2023.

Subscriptions for the 2022-23 season will go on sale April 7 and single tickets will be available on May 4. Tickets can be purchased online at www.theatre3dallas.com or over the phone at 214-871-3300.

theater

A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

undefined

Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

dso luisi ring wagner recording concerts music symphony