Theater Critic Picks

12 must-see shows in Dallas theater for April — plus 1 bonus

Soul Rep Theatre Company presents Pretty Fire

Soul Rep Theatre Company opens "Pretty Fire" on April 11.

Photo by Thaddeus Jefferson

Normally this list is reserved for productions opening during the month, but every now and then we make an exception. In this case, it's the touring theatrical experience Darkfield, currently parked right outside the AT&T Performing Arts Center in three giant shipping containers, and truly unlike anything else, onstage or off. It's immersive, but you aren't expected to move for the duration of each of the three presentations. One is performed in complete darkness. All rely on eerily accurate sound design — piped in through individual headphones — to create bizarre worlds that are still ... somehow familiar?

Check out Darkfield and then these 12 local shows, listed in order of start date:

Darkfield: Séance, Flight, and Coma
ATTPAC & Realscape Productions, through May 4
Darkfield offers audiences a unique, immersive theatrical experience that blurs the line between reality and imagination. There are three experiences: Séance, Flight, and Coma, each staged within a custom-built shipping container. The pitch-black environments utilize 360-degree binaural sound and innovative sensory effects to create immersive worlds that challenge perceptions and evoke deep emotional responses.

Dixie's Tupperware Party
Performing Arts Fort Worth, April 2-6
Meet Dixie Longate, the fast-talking, gum-chewing, ginger-haired Alabama gal who is bringing your grandma’s Tupperware party into the 21st century. Dixie demonstrates the many alternative uses for the iconic plastic kitchen staple while telling outrageously funny tales, encouraging audience participation, and offering a little bit of empowerment and homespun wisdom.

Thunder Knocking on the Door
Jubilee Theatre, April 4-May 4
Set against a backdrop of myth and magic, Thunder Knocking on the Door follows the journey of two families whose lives become intertwined by fate and music. As the mystical blues guitarist Marvell Thunder and the mysterious Jaguar Man vie for supremacy in a musical duel, the characters grapple with love, loss, and the power of redemption.

Pretty Fire
Soul Rep Theatre Company, April 11-19
This one-woman show explores beautiful, funny, dark, and exhilarating vignettes tracing the life of playwright Charlayne Woodard, from a premature birth to a joyous maturity at 11 years old. The play is a “rare autobiographical tour de force” painting one of the most positive pictures of the Black experience on stage.

Mamma Mia!
Broadway Dallas, April 15-27
Set on a Greek island paradise where the sun always shines, a tale of love, friendship, and identity is beautifully told through the timeless hits of ABBA. On the eve of her wedding, a daughter’s quest to discover the father she’s never known brings three men from her mother’s past back to the island they last visited decades ago.

Mean Girls
Broadway at the Center, April 17-19
Cady Heron may have grown up on an African savanna, but nothing prepared her for the vicious ways of her strange new home: suburban Illinois. Soon, this naïve newbie falls prey to a trio of lionized frenemies led by the charming but ruthless Regina George. But when Cady devises a plan to end Regina’s reign, she learns the hard way that you can’t cross a Queen Bee without getting stung.

Alice
Plague Mask Players, April 17-27
Ara Vito's movement and storytelling-focused adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is told through the lens of a female playwright and ensemble cast of all female and non-binary performers. Taking place in Wyly Theatre's Studio Theatre, the production is part of AT&T Performing Arts Center's Elevator Project.

The Hatmaker's Wife
Circle Theatre, April 17-May 10
When a young woman and her boyfriend move into their new home‭, ‬they uncover the magical history of its previous occupants‭: ‬a distracted hatmaker and his long-suffering wife‭, ‬who has left him‭, ‬taking his beloved hat along with her‭. ‬Through a whimsical and surreal narrative‭, ‬Lauren Yee's play redefines the concepts of family‭, ‬home‭, ‬and love‭, ‬bending time and space in delightful ways‭.‬

Rift, or White Lies
Amphibian Stage, April 18-May 12
Two brothers: lives divided, bound by blood. One is a progressive writer, the other a convicted murderer and member of an alt-right prison gang. As estranged brothers, they face their deep differences and uncover a shared painful past. Can they heal their bond, or will their clashing beliefs keep them apart? In this unique production, the actors switch roles throughout the run.

Healed
Second Thought Theatre, April 23-May 10
Opening Second Thought Theatre’s 21st season is Blake Hackler’s ruthlessly captivating story of Gail, who has been sick for 25 years. Every doctor, every test, every treatment — none of it has worked. Now, with nothing left to lose, she sells everything and heads to a radical health center in the Texas Hill Country, run by the enigmatic and controversial Dr. T. Will this be her cure, her salvation — or something else entirely?

The Grown-Ups
Kitchen Dog Theater, April 24-May 11
Following a group of camp counselors trying to mold the leaders of tomorrow when tomorrow is looking bleaker and bleaker, The Grown-Ups explores the traditions that change us, what it takes for us to change them, and how to change yourself when you’re hopelessly, tragically not prepared for this. Will be performed at Samuell-Grand Amphitheater.

The Mystery of Irma Vep
Theatre Three, April 24-May 18
Set in a spooky English manor, The Mystery of Irma Vep is a fast-paced and campy parody by Charles Ludlam featuring two actors who portray an array of eccentric characters, including mysterious housekeeper, a suspicious lord, and various supernatural beings. As the story unfolds, audiences are treated to a whirlwind of gothic melodrama, vampire lore, and supernatural shenanigans.

Xanadu
Uptown Players, April 25-May 4
Set in the magical 1980s, Xanadu follows the journey of a Greek muse, Kira, who descends from the heavens of Mount Olympus to Venice Beach, California, on a quest to inspire a struggling artist, Sonny, to achieve the greatest artistic creation of all time: the first roller disco.

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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.”

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