Theater Critic Picks

These are the 7 can't-miss shows in Dallas-Fort Worth theater for August

The Little Glass Slipper was recorded in Dallas last month, and is streaming as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Photo by Frank Del Corral

Besides Dallas making history as the first venue in the U.S. to host a big Broadway touring show following the COVID-19 shutdowns, there are still a handful of other impressive debuts happening.

From an Edinburgh Fringe participant to free community performances, there's a show for every taste during August.

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

12th Night: A Rock Musical
Junior Players and Shakespeare Dallas, August 3-8
Illyria is the new Coachella as The Bard's poetry is mixed into original infectious rock/pop style melodies in a new production of this classic gender-bending comedy. The madness for love unfolds after a shipwrecked Viola falls onto the Illyrian Shores.

Wicked
Dallas Summer Musicals, August 3-September 5
The first national Broadway tour post-pandemic has flown into the Music Hall at Fair Park, bringing with it an extraordinary green-skinned woman, her bubbly best friend, and a different angle on The Wizard of Oz.

Death on Delivery!
Pegasus Theatre, August 5-21
The setting is City Hospital, where Lt. Foster’s wife (Beverly, a.k.a. Bubbles) has just given birth to their first child, Harriet. But danger lurks around every corner, so the intrepid trio (Harry, his paid-by-the-hour assistant Nigel Grouse, and Lt. Foster of the “real” police) must solve a mysterious string of murders before a madman claims one of their own. RadioVizion is an alternative technique devised by Pegasus Theatre for the presentation of the Living Black & White series of Harry Hunsacker adventures. While RadioVizion does not employ the trade-secret makeup, it instead focuses on evoking the experience and glamour of being in a live radio studio of the 1930s and 1940s (though in this case you'll be at the Bath House Cultural Center). Live sound effects, actors at period-style live microphones, and costumes suggestive of the era complete the effect.

The Little Glass Slipper as Performed by the Queen of France and Her Friends
Cara Johnston, streaming August 6-30
France: 1789. Tensions are high and whispers of revolution fill the halls of Versailles. We are at the Queen’s Theatre attending a performance given by Marie Antoinette and her aristocratic friends. It is the 14th of July and today the Bastille will be stormed. Chaos ensues as both play and Ancien Régime fall apart. Follow as actors flee, assassination is attempted, and the age-old saying “the show must go on” is pushed to the limit. The show was recorded at Dallas' Majestic Theatre on July 14, 2021, in front of a small audience and is being streamed as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Your Healing is Killing Me
Cara Mía Theatre Co., August 19, 21-22
Playwright-in-residence Virginia Grise is performing her manifesto in the neighborhoods of Pleasant Grove, Oak Cliff, and Bachman Lake for free. Part performance, part writing and movement workshop, this interactive community tour asks audiences to come in comfortable, ready-to-move attire as they will become part of Grise’s performance. The script is based on Grise’s lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers and bourgie dermatologists.

Fun Home
Uptown Players, August 20-28
Based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir of the same name, Fun Home, developed by Lisa Kron (book/lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (score), is hailed as the first mainstream musical with a lesbian protagonist, and it explores themes of family, sexuality, and secrets. Originally postponed from last season, the musical is finally making its debut at the Kalita Humphreys Theater.

Libra Season
Second Thought Theatre, streaming August 20-September 4
Commissioned as part of the 2020 S.T.E.P. Program (Second Thought Emerging Playwrights), Libra Season has been in development for the past year specifically for zoom by Erin E. Adams. This play will be performed live each night and streamed via Zoom webinar from each actor’s own home. The employees of Libra Ltd. are having a bad autumn. After several stressful months of working from home, they now face a leaked memo with possible disastrous consequences. Plus, an impending public nervous breakdown from their teen spokesmodel.

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

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