Theater Critic Picks

These are the 8 can't-miss shows in Dallas-Fort Worth theater for November

Ochre House presents The Woman Who Knew Too Much

Ochre House is showing The Woman Who Knew Too Much, filmed in 2018.

Photo by Trent Stephenson

Dallas-Fort Worth theaters are adjusting to and even embracing the new challenges brought on by COVID-19. Audio plays, live-streamed concerts, archived productions, solo shows, and even socially distant outdoor performances are cropping up all over, giving you, the audience, plenty of entertainment choices.

Here are eight local shows to watch this month:

Cruise in a Box: Living Room Cruise Lines
Stage West, streaming through November 14
Set sail for an unforgettable, high seas staycation on the world's first ever Cruise in a Box. Your ticket doesn't just buy you passage on this not-so-nautical adventure — you'll also be mailed a special "ship"ment filled with everything you'd expect from a luxury cruise liner: plush towels you'll learn to transform into animals for your cabin, ocean-scented candles, a little umbrella to shade your favorite tropical drink, and so much more. You'll also join your Live Virtual Cruise Director for a night of world-class shipboard entertainment and variety performances as you sail across the globe, all from your own couch. Each show is $50 for the box and the Zoom event, and $35 for the event only, and tickets can be purchased here.

Endlings
Cry Havoc Theater Company, streaming on-demand through November 15
The opener to the youth theater company's seventh season was recently extended. It's an audio play recorded in true three-dimensional sound with a binaural microphone. The play weaves together first-person interviews with experts, activists, and individuals living on the front lines of climate change, along with conversations between the teens of Cry Havoc and the director on the topics of COVID-19, grief, art, and climate change.

Shakespeare and the Suffragists
Shakespeare Dallas, streaming through November 30
This new virtual performance project honors the centennial passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted many women the right to vote. It was conceived and directed by Shakespeare Dallas’ associate artistic director Jenni Stewart and co-written by Stewart along with filmmaker Julia Dyer. The unique performance examines Shakespeare’s more feminist texts and how they have been interpreted over time. Through the lens of four historical female figures, Stewart and Dyer shed new light on how Shakespeare’s works might have shaped the Suffragist movement and the ways in which his characters and monologues would have resonated in the 1920s.

The Woman Who Knew Too Much
Ochre House, currently streaming
Written and directed by Kevin Grammer, and filmed on March 3, 2018, this stylish noir musical is set in a seedy bar known as The Jade. A woman with no memory of who she is or where she comes from is the protagonist in a show that blurs the lines of reality and fantasy. Watch for free on the theater's YouTube channel.

#MATTER
Dallas Children's Theater, streaming November 6-15
To help spark important conversations about race, DCT is producing a series of plays by award-winning playwright, poet, and change-maker Idris Goodwin. These three short shows, dubbed the "Social Justice Play Series," started in September with The Water Gun Song. In this month's show, two former high school friends debate matters of life and race. There will also be an opportunity for a talkback led by Community Conversations founder on Denise Lee on November 13. Tickets are free and can be obtained here.

A Grave Is Given Supper
Teatro Dallas, November 7-8, 11-14
In its first live, in-person production since the beginning of the pandemic, Teatro Dallas partnered with Deep Vellum Publishing to turn Dallas poet Mike Soto's debut collection into an outdoor theatrical experience on the patio of the Latino Cultural Center. The immersive Narco-Acid Western is told in a series of interlinked poems, as audiences follow the converging paths of two protagonists through El Sumidero, a fictional U.S./Mexico border town ravaged by an ongoing drug war. The original script is directed and adapted by Claudia Acosta and stars New York-based actor Elena Hurst.

Erma Bombeck: At Wit's End
MainStage Irving-Las Colinas, streaming on-demand November 7-21
Ellen Locy portrays one of America's funniest moms in this one-person play by Allison Engel and Margaret Engel. The humorist championed the everyday lives of housewives with a daring truth few of her generation were willing to tell. Access codes start at $19 and are available to purchase here.

Live From the West Side: Women of Broadway
Dallas Summer Musicals, live-streaming November 14
Tony Award-winner and TV star Laura Benanti is this month's diva, performing a virtual concert transmitted live in HD from The Shubert Virtual Studios on Manhattan’s West Side, with professional sound mixing. The concert will feature a mix of Broadway show tunes, pop songs and personal stories from Benanti's life, as well as give at-home audience members the chance to email in questions to be answered during the livestream. Single tickets are $30 and can be purchased here.

dance 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