Season Announcement

Ensemble musicals and intimate plays populate Dallas Theater Center's 2022-23 season

Whodunnit ... onstage.

Paramount Pictures

Two productions from last season have been shifted into Dallas Theater Center's 2022-23 season, which will take place at the Wyly Theatre in the AT&T Performing Arts Center and at the Kalita Humphreys Theater.

"We are thrilled to return to producing a full season of vibrant, joyful plays and musicals for our community," says DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty. "These plays will allow us to come together as a community to laugh, gain insights into the human condition, and be inspired by the delight of experiencing shared stories alongside our friends and neighbors from all throughout Dallas. These productions will also celebrate the artistry of our outstanding professional resident artists, working in collaboration with talented actors, directors, and designers from North Texas and across the country."

Artistic producer Sarahbeth Grossman also notes that the company will be adding an associate artistic director and a resident music director, though those names have not been revealed yet.

First up is Clue, based on the Paramount Pictures screenplay by Jonathan Lynn, written by Sandy Rustin, with additional material by Hunter Foster and Eric Price, and with original music by Michael Holland.

The tale begins at a remote mansion where six mysterious guests have assembled for an unusual dinner party where murder and blackmail are on the menu. When their host turns up dead, they all become suspects. Directed by Alan Muraoka, it runs September 8-25, 2022, at the Wyly Theatre.

Alice Childress' Trouble in Mind is next (and the first holdover from last season). This 1955 comedy-drama was planned for Broadway but canceled when the playwright wouldn’t tone down its message. It made a triumphant premiere in New York in 2021 and now Dallas is having its regional premiere, directed by Tiana Kaye Blair.

Follow an experienced Black stage actress through rehearsals of a major Broadway production in this funny, moving, and ultimately shattering look at racism, identity, and ego in the high-stakes world of New York theater. It runs October 13-30, 2022, at the Kalita Humphreys Theater.

Native Gardens is the second to be shifted from last season. In Karen Zacarías' contemporary comedy, 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 spiral into an all-out border dispute, exposing both couples’ notions of race, taste, class, and privilege. It runs February 16-March 5, 2023, at the Kalita Humphreys Theater.

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's dark classic Into the Woods shows what happens after "happily ever after."

The story follows a Baker and his wife, who wish to have a child; Cinderella, who wishes to attend the King’s Festival; and Jack, who wishes his cow would give milk. As their individual adventures begin to overlap and their wishes are granted, the characters learn that "no one is alone." Kevin Moriarty directs, and it runs April 7-April 30, 2023, at the Wyly Theatre.

A Christmas Carol is back as a holiday add-on, written by Charles Dickens, adapted by Kevin Moriarty, directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, and with choreography by Joel Ferrell. It runs November 25-December 24, 2022, at the Wyly Theatre.

The annual community summer pageant Public Works Dallas also returns, featuring 200 cast members — only a select few of which are professional actors. Production details and ticket information will be offered to the public at a later date.

Dallas Theater Center’s season tickets are on sale now and include Clue, Trouble In Mind, Native Gardens, and Into The Woods. The Total Package, DTC’s full, four-play season subscription, starts at $118 with season ticket holders receiving additional benefits and discounts.

Season tickets can be purchased online at www.dallastheatercenter.org or by calling the box office at 214-522-8499.

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