Theater Critic Picks

Spooky thrills and clever comedy take over Dallas stages in October

Lyric Stage presents "The Rocky Horror Show."

Photo courtesy of Lyric Stage

October is here and it's spooky season onstage, with productions that include the cult classic Rocky Horror Show, The Addams Family, a piece inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, and a play about the trading of Luka Doncic away from the Mavericks — that's the scariest of all!

Here are 12 shows appearing in Dallas-Fort Worth theaters in September, listed in order of start date:

Latinidades Festival
Cara Mia Theatre, October 2-12
Dallas’s largest international Latino theatre festival is back for its sixth year with six mainstage productions and various second-stage performances spanning theater, dance, music, and poetry to highlight diverse Latin American voices. Also returning is the Arts Symposium: "How Our Arts Will Thrive in Times of Change." For a full schedule of events, go to the festival website.

cleaVage
MusicalWriters.com Productions & Lakeside Community Theatre, October 3-18
It's the world premiere of this a laugh-out-loud new musical comedy about the rise, fall, and rebound of silicone gel breast implants. Conceived by Dallas plastic surgeon Dr. Ron Friedman and co-written with Laura Goodenow, cleaVage has been described as “Hamilton with breasts” by Texas Monthly.

Noises Off
Dallas Theater Company, October 3-26
Michael Frayn’s uproarious classic British comedy is a play-within-a-play that plunges the audience into the chaotic world of Nothing’s On, a fictional touring production tormented by backstage romances and onstage blunders. From flubbed lines to slamming doors, witness the hilarious unraveling of a troupe of eccentric actors.

King Hedley II
Soul Rep Theatre Company & Bishop Arts Theatre Center, October 9-26
Set in 1985 Pittsburgh, August Wilson's King Hedley II follows an ex-convict's fight to rebuild his life and reclaim his future amid hardship, hope, and the weight of the past.

Mac Beth
Circle Theatre, October 9-November 1
After school‭, ‬seven teenage girls convene in an abandoned lot‭. ‬They drop their backpacks‭, ‬transform their uniforms‭, ‬and dive into a DIY retelling of Macbeth‭. As the girls conjure‭ ‬kings‭, ‬warriors‭, ‬and witches‭, ‬Shakespeare’s bloody tale seeps into their reality‭.

The Trade: A Tragedy in Four Quarters
Theatre Three, October 9-November 2
In this fast-paced, highly unauthorized, foam middle-fingered satire, the Dallas Mavericks are on the brink of greatness — so naturally, Nico slams the self-destruct button. With a Greek chorus narrating the tragic downfall, a Kiss Cam, “Luka Doncic,” “Mark Cuban,” and a cameo from “Anthony Davis’ Hernia,” The Trade skewers the madness behind the moves, the myth that millionaires and billionaires must know what they’re doing, and the heartbreak of loving something that doesn’t love you back. In Dallas, tragedy wears Nikes.

The Rocky Horror Show
Lyric Stage, October 10-26
In this cult classic, sweethearts Brad and Janet, stuck with a flat tire during a storm, discover the eerie mansion of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. As their innocence is lost, Brad and Janet meet a houseful of wild characters, including a rocking biker and a creepy butler. Through elaborate dances and rock songs, Frank-N-Furter unveils his latest creation: a muscular man named “Rocky.” Complete with sass from the audience, cascading toilet paper, and an array of other audience participation props, this deliberately kitschy rock ’n’ roll sci-fi gothic musical is more fun than ever.

Incarnate
Second Thought Theatre, October 15-November 1
Incarnate, by STT’s own Parker Davis Gray, is a horror/thriller that follows two artists over the course of a year in their seemingly pointless pursuit of creation while suffering under great grief. Trapped in her cell, Rosamund is hellbent on escaping her fate while the Man who kidnapped her struggles with the consequences of what grief can do, and how far he will go to escape it. Can they live with themselves? Or, more importantly, who else is living with them?

Ride the Cyclone
Stage West, October 16-November 2
In this critically acclaimed cult musical, a freak roller coaster accident derails the lives of the entire St. Cassian High School chamber choir. Now dead, trapped in carnival limbo, they’re greeted by a mechanical fortune teller who proposes a talent show. The prize? One lucky winner will return to life.

The Birds
Amphibian Stage, October 17-November 9
Based on Daphne du Maurier’s story (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s famous film), The Birds brings a chilling and suspenseful look at human nature in the face of societal collapse. When killer birds start attacking, three strangers seek shelter in an isolated house. But as paranoia creeps in, they realize the biggest threat might not be coming from outside.

The Addams Family
Broadway at the Bass, October 24-26
Wednesday Addams, the ultimate princess of darkness, has grown up and fallen in love with a sweet, smart young man from a respectable family. A man her parents have never met. And if that weren’t upsetting enough, she confides in her father and begs him not to tell her mother. Now, Gomez Addams must do something he’s never done before: keep a secret from his beloved wife, Morticia. Everything will change for the whole family on the fateful night they host a dinner for Wednesday’s “normal” boyfriend and his parents.

A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical
Broadway at the Bass, October 28-November 2
This is the untold true story of a Brooklyn kid who became a chart-busting, show-stopping, award-winning American icon, created in collaboration with Neil Diamond himself.

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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.”

dso luisi ring wagner recording concerts music symphony

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A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set