Theater Critic Picks

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

Dallas actors Bob Hess and Sally Vahle are coming to you, via the UK, in Dear Donald/Dear Hillary.

Photo by Noah Sargent

Grab your beach blankets, grab your lawn chairs, charge your phone, fire up the TV, or just get ready to sit in an air-conditioned theater space, because summer theater has started to arrive.

And it comes in so many forms this month: live and outdoors, pre-recorded, and even on TikTok. And, of course, there's plenty of Shakespeare.

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

Hedda Gabler
Undermain Theatre, streaming through June 13
Blake Hackler adapted and directed this version of Ibsen's masterpiece, which tells the story of an extraordinary woman trapped in a conventional life of secrets and lies that fuel her own personal explosion. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased here.

Dear Donald/Dear Hillary (Their Secret Correspondence)
Elaine Liner, streaming through June 27
Dallas playwright (and former theater critic) Liner penned this two-actor play as a reaction to the 2016 election, imagining if the two presidential candidates had been secret pen pals. Local luminaries Bob Hess and Sally Vahle star with direction by Noah Sargent. It was filmed at a Dallas theater as part of the lineup for the UK's Brighton Fringe (but can be viewed from anywhere). Tickets are £12 and can be purchased here.

Hamlet Project
Shakespeare Dallas, June 3-13
This one-person interpretation of Hamlet features two different actors every night, who will show you what's so rotten in Denmark in about 90 minutes using two different scripts written by Migdalia Cruz and Erik Ehn, that the actors won't see until showtime (a la White Rabbit Red Rabbit).

The Music Man
Theatre Three, June 3-July 4
Director Joel Ferrell and music director Vonda K. Bowling have reimagined Meredith Willson's classic musical about a con man who turns one town upside down into a boutique, outdoor, touring production. Kyle Igneczi leads a 10-person cast across three venues: outside the Coppell Senior Center, Union Coffee Shop, and the Texas Discovery Gardens.

Hammer Toe and The Adventures of Ability-Lad and Genius-Lass
Pegasus Theatre, streaming June 4-20
As part of its Fresh Reads program, Pegasus is streaming two new superhero-themed comedies for $10 each. The first, written by Tammy Green and directed by Ben Shroth, follows an incapacitated Thor's cousin Freya as she goes on an epic adventure. The second, written by Eric Palmer and directed by Joey Dietz, is set in Cityopolis, where the police commissioner and mayor have made all crime illegal — and put its two superheroes out of the job. Buy on-demand streaming access to The Adventures of... here, and Hammer Toe here.

23rd Annual New Works Festival
Kitchen Dog Theater, online June 4-26
To celebrate its 30th anniversary season, Kitchen Dog Theater has transformed its NWF Staged Reading Series into the New Works Festival Commission Series – In the Works. This year’s four commissioned BIPOC playwrights include Ruben Carrazana (Dallas), Tara Moses (Seminole Nation, Oklahoma), Erin Malone Tuner (Dallas), and Haygen-Brice Walker (Philadelphia). A full lineup for the festival, which includes the 20th year of PUP Fest, can be found here.

Much Ado About Nothing
The Classics Theatre Project, June 9-27
A rad 1990s nostalgia-filled adaptation of William Shakespeare's comedy is coming to the lawn at Addison Conference and Theatre Center, so bring your sand chairs and picnic blankets. When the AA baseball team the Aragon Soldiers arrives in town, its aces — the dashing Claudio and fast-talking Benedick — take their at-bats with the lovely Hero and fierce Beatrice. Claudio and Hero quickly fall in love, but Benedick and Beatrice (both sworn singles) match only wits. Meanwhile, the dastardly Don John threatens to destroy both couples in this fresh take on William Shakespeare's crowd-pleasing tale of outrageous characters, pranks, mistaken identities, and new love.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare Everywhere, June 14 & 21
Some of DFW theater's finest are assembling to put on this magical tale from the Bard, which includes fairies, love spells, and even some shape-shifting. The first performance is at Klyde Warren Park and the second is at Deep Ellum Art Co.

A Solitary Man: The Music of Neil Diamond
Casa Mañana, June 15-26
Hamilton's Darnell Abraham and American Idol winner Nick Fradiani star in this concert at the Reid Cabaret Theatre, which spans everything from "Sweet Caroline" to "America" while intertwining stories about one of the best-selling musicians of all time.

Turkey and Bones and Eating and We Liked It
Leos Ensemble Theatre, online June 24-onward
Devising with actors in Texas and New Jersey, director Kelli J. Howard has reimagined Gertrude Stein’s 1916 text for the newest social media app: TikTok. Leos Ensemble is the first theater group in the U.S., if not the world, to conceive a theater show specifically for this platform, where the interaction with TikTok content is part of the show itself. You can view it online here, or watch a recorded version on YouTube and Instagram.

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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

Theater Critic Picks

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

A good listen

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

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