Theater Critic Picks

These are the 10 can't-miss shows in Dallas-Fort Worth theater for January

Go way down with Hadestown this month.

Photo by T Charles Erickson

UPDATE: Due to COVID-19, Circle Theatre's production of Denise Lee's Pressure Makes Diamonds has been postponed to April 21-30, 2022. Theatre Three's production of Maytag Virgin has changed its dates to February 5-20, 2022.

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It's the New Year, and coronavirus still insists on being in the spotlight. Several productions have already announced cancellations or postponements (including Shakespeare Dallas' Twelfth Night and Junior Players' Be More Chill), but there are quite a few still going ahead.

In order of start date, here are 10 local shows to watch this month:

What the Constitution Means to Me
AT&T Performing Arts Center, January 4-9
Playwright Heidi Schreck’s boundary-breaking play breathes new life into the Constitution and imagines how it will shape the next generation of Americans. Fifteen-year-old Heidi earned her college tuition by winning Constitutional debate competitions across the United States. In this hilarious, hopeful, and achingly human new play, she resurrects her teenage self to trace the profound relationship between four generations of women and the founding document that shaped their lives.

Dear Evan Hansen
Broadway at the Bass, January 4-9
A letter that was never meant to be seen, a lie that was never meant to be told, a life he never dreamed he could have. Evan Hansen is about to get the one thing he’s always wanted: a chance to finally fit in. Dear Evan Hansen is the deeply personal and profoundly contemporary musical about life and the way we live it.

The Forever Quest
Cry Havoc Theater Company, January 7-15
Cry Havoc begins its eighth season with a new devised work directed by Ashley H. White, artistic director of Imprint Theatreworks, and the teens of Cry Havoc. In a chaotic, unpredictable word, the greatest gift we can bestow on children is resiliency. The Forever Quest will explore the importance of friends, one’s chosen family, and trust in one’s own abilities.

Denise Lee's Pressure Makes Diamonds
Circle Theatre, January 13-29
This original production will shine a bright light on a diamond’s similarities to life. Denise Lee, recently seen at Circle Theatre in The Glass Menagerie, with the help of her band, will touch audiences' souls with a collection of songs from many classic artists. This new production is both a collaboration with and directed by Monique Midgette.

Hadestown
Dallas Summer Musicals, January 18-30
Hadestown intertwines two mythic tales — that of young dreamers Orpheus and Eurydice, and that of King Hades and his wife Persephone — as it invites the audience on a hell-raising journey to the underworld and back. Singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell’s beguiling melodies and director Rachel Chavkin’s poetic imagination pit industry against nature, doubt against faith, and fear against love. This show is performed at the Winspear Opera House.

Hamilton
Broadway at the Bass, January 18-February 6
This is the story of America's Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the West Indies who became George Washington's right-hand man during the Revolutionary War and was the new nation’s first Treasury Secretary. Featuring a score that blends hip-hop, jazz, blues, rap, R&B, and Broadway, Hamilton is the story of America then, as told by America now.

Anna in the Tropics
MainStage Irving-Las Colinas, January 21-February 5
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, this poetic play by Nilo Cruz is set in 1929 in a Floridian Cuban American cigar factory, a place where cigars are still rolled by hand and "lectors" are employed to read newspapers, poetry, and novels to the workers. The new lector reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, unaware that the passions it inflames will spin the listeners’ relationships out of control.

Church & State
Stage West, January 27-February 20
Three days before his bid for re-election — in the wake of another school shooting — a U.S. senator has a life-altering crisis of faith, triggering an off-the-cuff comment which sends the entire campaign into a tailspin. His wife and campaign manager try to contain the damage, but in a country where religion influences politics and politics have become a religion, how do you reach the people and stay true to yourself?

Maytag Virgin
Theatre Three, January 27-February 20
The regional premiere of Audrey Cefaly’s play follows Alabama schoolteacher Lizzy Nash and her new neighbor, Jack Key, over the year following the tragic death of Lizzy’s husband. The play explores the ideas of inertia and self-enlightenment, and the bridge between the two. Directed by Whitney Latrice Coulter, this new play is packed with wit, passion, and the weight of moving forward through loss.

Lil & Satchmo: A Play with Music
Jubilee Theatre, January 28-February 27
This musical love story showcases the works of both the well-known great Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin Armstrong, Louis’s second wife (of four), who herself loomed as a highly renowned jazz musician and pianist. Despite their marriage having ended years before, Lil Hardin Armstrong, at 73, plays a lively, boogie-woogie version of “St. Louis Blues” during a televised outdoor concert in Chicago’s Civic Center Plaza on August 27, 1971, as a deep, heartfelt, loving tribute to the recently deceased legendary “Satchmo.” Expressing her still-strong love for Louis while performing one of his all-time favorite songs, an ethereal Louis suddenly appears — but only for her eyes to see.

concerts 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

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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