Season announcement

Mystic Pizza's Dallas premiere leads new AT&T PAC Broadway season

Mystic Pizza: A New Musical will be among the five touring productions that are part of the 2026-2027 Broadway at the Center season.

Photo courtesy of Lively McCabe Entertainment

The 2026-2027 Broadway at the Center season at Dallas' AT&T Performing Arts Center will feature a mixture of new and returning shows, including several recent Tony Award-nominated productions.

According to a release, the main season will consist of five musicals: Mystic Pizza: A New Musical, Shucked, Beetlejuice, The Who’s Tommy, and The Wiz. All productions take place at Winspear Opera House in downtown Dallas.

They will be joined by two previously-announced co-productions with Broadway Dallas - The Notebook and Hadestown - as well as TITAS/Dance Unbound co-production, Dance Me - The Music of Leonard Cohen.

First up will be Dance Me - The Music of Leonard Cohen, a creation inspired by the work of famed Montreal-based poet, artist, and songwriter Leonard Cohen, performed by Ballet Jazz Montreal.

The homage to the iconic artist evokes the grand cycles of existence in five seasons, as described in Cohen’s deeply reflective music and poems. There will be performances on September 18 and 19, 2026.

The first theater production will be Mystic Pizza: A New Musical, making its Dallas premiere. It is based on the 1988 rom-com that tells the story of three working-class girls who navigate the complexities of life, love, and family in a small-town pizza joint.

The score features megahits of the '80s and '90s, including songs originally recorded by Melissa Etheridge, Cyndi Lauper, John Cougar Mellencamp, and more. It will run November 20-22, 2026.

After the Broadway Dallas co-production of The Notebook, running January 12-24, 2027, the season picks up again with the return of Shucked, which played at the Music Hall at Fair Park in December 2024.

In the Tony Award-winning comedy, the corn that protects a small community starts to die. The town needs answers. But who will dare to venture beyond the borders of Cob County?

The Broadway hit, running March 19-21, 2027 is about an unlikely hero, an unscrupulous con artist, and a battle for the heart and soil of a small town.

Hadestown will follow shortly thereafter, running March 30-April 4, 2027, before the third Broadway Dallas co-production of the season, Beetlejuice, running April 28-May 2, 2027.

The musical, which previously came to Dallas in early 2024, is based on Tim Burton’s 1988 film and tells the story of Lydia Deetz, a strange and unusual teenager whose whole life changes when she meets a recently deceased couple and a demon with a thing for stripes.

June 2027 will bring the final two productions of the season, The Who’s Tommy (running June 3-5) and The Wiz (running June 10-13).

The Who's 1969 rock opera is about the young Tommy Walker whose innate knack for pinball catapults him from reticent adolescent to celebrity savior. It features the anthems “I’m Free,” “See Me, Feel Me,” “Sensation,” and “Pinball Wizard.”

The Wiz, which just came to Dallas in September 2025, is a groundbreaking twist on The Wizard of Oz that features soul, gospel, rock, and '70s funk that puts Dorothy’s journey to find her place in a contemporary world.

“This season is designed to welcome both longtime subscribers and new audiences with a lineup that celebrates the full range of Broadway - from high-energy crowd pleasers and reimagined classics to bold contemporary storytelling,” said Warren Tranquada, CEO and President of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, in a statement.

For the first time in their partnership with Broadway Dallas, Broadway at the Center subscribers will enjoy early access and full subscriber benefits for Beetlejuice through May 1.

After May 1, all ticket purchases, customer service questions, and support for Beetlejuice will be handled directly by Broadway Dallas.

The Center offers a flexible subscription package that allows patrons to choose four or five shows from the season lineup, with the option to add or remove shows by contacting the box office directly.

Subscription package prices range from $150-$660, and sales begin on Monday, April 13, 2026. Packages may be purchased by phone at 214-880-0202, or online at attpac.org/broadway.

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