Season Announcement

Dallas Theater Center tentatively schedules 2020-21 season of new and beloved works

Tiny Beautiful Things Off-Broadway at the Public

Playwright Nia Vardalos in the Off-Broadway production of Tiny Beautiful Things.

Photo by Joan Marcus

With American Mariachi having been streamed online and Pipeline suspended due to coronavirus concerns, Dallas Theater Center is still nevertheless forging ahead with its next season. There's one catch though: no dates yet.

Patrons are encouraged to buy 2020-21 season subscriptions — obviously single tickets are not on sale — and coordinate their chosen performances with the box office once dates are announced.

"The recent cancellation of live arts and entertainment performances due to public health concerns is creating very real financial consequences for the national arts community," reads a statement on DTC's website. "Purchasing your subscription now supports Dallas Theater Center during these uncertain times, and will help us to mitigate losses and ensure the future of the arts here at home, in Dallas."

Directed by Kevin Moriarty, The Sound of Music is hopefully first. A country divided. A family paralyzed by loss. A young woman afraid to love. Dallas Theater Center boldly re-examines one of the most beloved musical theater classics ever written.

Screenwriter and actor Nia Vardalos is the scribe behind the stage adaptation of Cheryl Strayed's book Tiny Beautiful Things, which was co-conceived by Vardalos, Marshall Heyman, and Thomas Kail (you know him as the director of Hamilton). It follows Sugar, an online advice columnist who uses her personal experiences to help the real-life readers who pour their hearts out to her. Rich with humor, insight, compassion — and absolute honesty — Tiny Beautiful Things is about reaching when you’re stuck, healing when you’re broken, and finding the courage to take on the questions that have no answers. Joel Ferrell directs.

Written by Vichet Chum and directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene (another Hamilton director, who helmed the national tour), High School Play: A Nostalgia Fest is a world premiere and co-production with Houston's Alley Theatre. It’s senior year in Carrollton, and Riverside High School’s competitive theater troupe is climbing back to the top from last year’s unprecedented loss. Dara is trying to rally his teammates, while new kid Paul disrupts Dara’s complete understanding of himself and his small-town suburban life. When coaches Dirkson and Blow make a bold choice for the one-act play competition and the community takes issue, friends and rivals duke it out and find themselves.

You can’t choose your neighbors. In Native Gardens, a brilliant new comedy by Karen Zacarías, cultures and gardens clash, turning well-intentioned neighbors into feuding enemies. Pablo, a rising attorney, and doctoral candidate Tania, his very pregnant wife, have just purchased a home next to Frank and Virginia, a well-established D.C. couple with a prize-worthy English garden. But an impending barbecue for Pablo’s colleagues and a delicate disagreement over a long-standing fence line soon spirals into an all-out border dispute, exposing both couples’ notions of race, taste, class, and privilege.

A co-production with Stage West, What to Send Up When It Goes Down by Aleshea Harris is a play, a ritual, and a home-going celebration that bears witness to the physical and spiritual deaths of black people as a result of racist violence. Meant to disrupt the pervasiveness of anti-blackness and acknowledge the resilience of black people throughout history, this groundbreaking play blurs the boundaries between actors and audiences, offering a space for catharsis, discussion, reflection, and healing. Directed by Akin Babatunde.

A return of DTC's annual production of A Christmas Carol is a season add-on, as is a world premiere re-imagining of Designing Women, written by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. It’s 2020, and Julia, Suzanne, Mary Jo, and Charlene are partners in the Atlanta-based interior design firm, Sugarbaker’s. But with the firm in crisis, they’re on the verge of a radical decision to sell the business and separate. A co-production with theaterSquared and Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

Season tickets can be purchased online at www.DallasTheaterCenter.org or by calling 214-522-8499.

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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