Tony Time

Dallas Theater Center wins this year's coveted regional Tony Award

On June 11, the rest of the country will join in giving Dallas Theater Center a much-deserved round of applause when the company is presented with the 2017 Regional Theater Tony Award.

The Tony Awards are America's highest theatrical honor, and each year they single out one nonprofit professional regional theater company in the United States that "has displayed a continuous level of artistic achievement contributing to the growth of theater nationally." The award is nominated and voted on by the American Theatre Critics Association (of which I am a voting member).

“The Tony Award is one of the most coveted honors in the American theater, and receiving it is a cause for great celebration throughout Dallas,” says DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty in a release. “This award is in recognition of DTC’s nearly 60 years of achievement. It’s a testament to the artistry of the theater’s previous artistic directors: Paul Baker, Adrian Hall, Ken Bryant, and Richard Hamburger. It’s an honor for the many talented artists whose work has graced our stages. It’s an acknowledgement of the deep relationship between DTC and our community here in North Texas, for whom we produce plays that inspire meaningful conversations. It’s a tribute to the diversity of artists who seek to create art that mirrors the glorious diversity of our community. And it’s a validation of our city’s shared belief that a great city requires great art to bring us together, ask vital questions, and inspire us to build a more perfect union.”

Dallas Theater Center is the resident company of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, and is a member of the League of Resident Theatres. The Diane and Hal Brierley Resident Acting Company demonstrates DTC’s abiding commitment to supporting a core group of resident artists.

Several of its world-premiere shows have gone on to enjoy productions in New York City: Bella will play off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons this May and June, while Lysistrata Jones (titled Give It Up! in Dallas) played Broadway in 2011. That same playwright, Douglas Carter Beane, will premiere his new musical Hood at DTC this summer.

“This is a unique Tony Award because it does not honor a single play, performance, director, or design, it honors a body of work over a number of years,” says DTC managing director Jeff Woodward in a release. “This award honors our terrific and talented staff and our dedicated board of trustees, led by Julie Hersh and Jeff Bragalone. It honors our adventurous audience, especially our subscribers. It honors the strong and consistent support we receive from our donors, and it honors the great city of Dallas.”

Some of DTC's significant innovations include the launching of Public Works Dallas, a groundbreaking community engagement and participatory theater project designed to deliberately blur the line between professional artists and community members, and receiving a 2013 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award for Project Discovery, a program that provides in-depth theater experiences for thousands of teens from 30 North Texas high schools.

“DTC is one of the oldest regional theaters in the country,” says Charlotte St. Martin, president of the Broadway League, in a release. “They truly embody the importance of bringing live theater to audiences and educational programs to schools and youth throughout the community. Arts education is one of the most vital programs we can offer today’s youth, and as it continues to be threatened, theaters around the country are stepping in to fill the voids that the cuts have created. We are proud of the community of theater, and DTC, that are stepping in to provide this vital form of education.”

The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing present the Tony Awards, which will be broadcast live on CBS June 11 from Radio City Music Hall. Kevin Spacey is this year's host.

Dallas Theater Center's immersive, site-specific production of Electra runs through May 27. It's next play, Inherit the Wind, opens May 16 at the Kalita Humphreys Theater.

Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty and managing director Jeff Woodward.

Photo by Karen Almond

Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty and managing director Jeff Woodward.

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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