Theater Critic Picks

These are the 12 can't-miss shows in Dallas-Fort Worth theater for September

We've got two world premieres and several established favorites this month, which include a few from movies-turned-musicals and shows that later inspired movies. Singing newsboys, meddling matchmakers, scheming villains, and plays that tackle important issues both current and historical are all waiting in the wings.

Here are the 12 shows to see, in order by start date:

Fort Worth Fringe Festival
Texas Nonprofit Theatres, Inc. and the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, September 7-8
Featuring 17 different acts ranging from lesser-produced theater, dance, burlesque, puppetry, poetry, and more, the festival welcomes performers from all over the state of Texas and beyond.

Hurricane Diane
Echo Theatre, September 7-22
Greek god Dionysus comes back to Earth disguised as a permaculture specialist named Diane, and she's pretty upset to find how we have been treating Mother Nature. So she plants seeds of seduction in a quiet little cul-de-sac to launch her ultimate plan: destroy our cookie-cutter, HGTV-obsessed America. Cindee Mayfield, Angela Davis, Whitney Holotik, Stephanie Butler, and Octavia Y. Thomas star in this play by Madeleine George, the scribe behind Echo's hit Precious Little.

Hello, Dolly!
Casa Mañana, September 8-16
Beloved local actor David Coffee celebrates his 50th year performing at Casa, this time taking on the role of the curmudgeonly businessman who's the focus of matchmaker Mrs. Dolly Gallagher Levi. Broadway performer Jacquelyn Piro Donovan stars as Dolly in Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart's 1964 hit.

The Cuban and the Redhead
Pegasus Theatre, September 13-30
This new musical by Robert Bartley and Danny Whitman is about cultural icons Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Escaping bloodshed in Cuba, a young man sets sail on a turbulent journey that leads him all the way to Hollywood and into the arms of a fiery, redheaded movie star named Lucille Ball. They put their egos and dreams of stardom on the line in a gamble to save one thing — their marriage — and risk it all on an untested and floundering new medium called television.

Once
Theatre Three, September 13-October 7
Based on the popular film, Once centers around a Dublin street musician who's about to give up on his dream when a beautiful young woman takes an interest in his haunting love songs. The 2012 Tony-winning musical by Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, and Enda Walsh features an ensemble of actor/musicians who play their own instruments onstage, with direction by Marianne Galloway and music direction by Scott A. Eckert.

How is it That We Live or Shakey Jake + Alice
Undermain Theatre, September 13-October 7
The world premiere from longtime Undermain collaborator Len Jenkin traces the lives of two lovers through the years, from the first kiss to the last goodbye and everything in between.

Othello
Shakespeare Dallas, September 19-29
The Bard's classic drama about a noble general whose life and marriage are sabotaged by theater's most infamous villain stars Jamal Sterling and Caitlin Glass. Shakespeare Dallas' rendition is set amid war and palace intrigue in the early 20th-century Mediterranean region.

WET: A DACAmented Journey
Cara Mía Theatre Co., September 20-30
Written and performed by L.A.'s Alex Alpharaoh, this one-man show explores what it means to be an American in every sense of the word except one: on paper. Based on a true story, WET chronicles one DACA recipient's ongoing battle of living all but his first three months of life in the United States as an undocumented citizen. The production is performed in the Theatre Too space at Theatre Three.

Newsies
Lyric Stage, September 21-23
Based on the 1992 motion picture and inspired by a true story, Newsies features a Tony Award-winning score by Alan Menken and Jack Feldman and a book by Tony Award winner Harvey Fierstein. Set in turn-of-the century New York City, it's the rousing tale of Jack Kelly, a charismatic newsboy who rallies newsies from across the city to strike against the unfair conditions of publishing titans Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika
Uptown Players, September 28-October 7
The entire original cast from Uptown's production of Millennium Approaches reunites for the conclusion of one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. The award-winning play explores gay culture, race, political injustice, inequality, and the future of America through the lens of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. This "Gay Fantasia on National Themes" raises the stakes, with characters confronting the real, the ethereal, and themselves, with the conclusion taking place five years after our introduction to these memorable characters.

Steel Magnolias
Dallas Theater Center, September 28-October 21
Every Southern woman knows there are few institutions on earth more important than the town beauty parlor. At Truvy Jones' salon in Chinquapin, Louisiana, neighborhood women gather to swap stories, share gossip, and, of course, style their hair. But when tragedy strikes, the community comes together in a bond more powerful than 10 coats of hairspray in Robert Harling's play, which was the basis for the popular movie.

Nina Simone: Four Women
Jubilee Theatre, September 28-October 28
September 16, 1963: The day after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which led Nina Simone to shift her career from artist to artist-activist. Christina Ham's play with music uses the framework of one of her most blistering songs, "Four Women," to give voice to a group of women who suffered from self-hatred due to the different hues of their skin.

All the performers in Once at Theatre Three play their own instruments.

Photo by Jeffrey Schmidt

All the performers in Once at Theatre Three play their own instruments.

theater openings

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

undefined

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