Theater Critic Picks

The 10 can't-miss Dallas plays and musicals for May

Undermain Theatre presents "H*llo K*tty Syndrome."

Photo by Paul Semrad

A lot of iconic characters can be found in this month's line-up, from Michael Jackson and The Temptations to Hello Kitty, Jellicle kitties, and even Patti Lupone.

In order of start date, here are 10 local shows to watch this month:

A Dallas Hedda
Bishop Arts Theatre Center, through May 10
BATC's playwright-in-residence Franky D. Gonzalez has reimagined Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, which explored the psyche of a woman whose labyrinthine soul and longing for freedom from a world that sought always to control her. Gonzalez's concept picks up the conversation that Ibsen began and continues to explore freedom through the lens of the conversations that we in the United States (and indeed throughout the world) have been having around the intersections of race, religion, feminism, and social class.

H*llo K*tty Syndrome
Undermain Theatre, through May 25
HK is a little lost. They just quit their job as a police officer, broke up with their cowboy-partner, and made a vendetta with their brother-in-law. In Brian Dang’s genre-bending comedy, HK finds themselves caught in the throes of a family drama, noir, and romance. And worst of all, nobody will stop commenting on the fact that they are wearing a Hello Kitty™ mascot costume — though it’s slightly off because of copyright laws.

Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song
AT&T Performing Arts Center, May 6-10
From Frozen to Phantom to Wicked, Forbidden Broadway is a satirical roast of over 30 Broadway hits featuring outrageous costumes, silly spoofs of the songs you know by heart, and madcap impressions by a stellar cast. A New York sensation for 35 years, a talented quintet of comic chameleons throw out pointed parodies at a dizzying pace.

Moving Creatures
Ochre House Theater, May 9-24
This is a politically charged satire about an evil and intolerable oligarch, Baron Leopold Verdugo, and his four monstrous creations. The Baron is a soured, bloated old goat who lords over a once rich and beautiful region that is now a wasteland due to the Baron’s greediness. The monsters were once beautiful, successful women that fell victim to the Baron’s insatiable desire to kill, destroy, and rebuild in his own image. The story, which takes place during the Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century, is a mysterious world that has a moving mansion, disrespectful furniture, talking portraits of surly ancestors, and constantly changing rooms, gardens, and grand halls.

MJ the Musical
Broadway at the Bass, May 13-18
The music. The moves. The icon. Now, the unparalleled artistry of the greatest entertainer of all time is featured in MJ, the Tony Award-winning new musical centered around the making of the 1992 Dangerous World Tour. The production goes beyond the singular moves and signature sound of the star, offering a rare look at the creative mind and collaborative spirit that catapulted Michael Jackson into legendary status.

El Otro
Teatro Dallas, May 16-31
A simple ride to retrieve a birthday gift sends a young teenage girl named Romy and her two fathers on a phantasmagoric ride through a harrowing night. Lupe, her birth father, forces her to choose between him and Ben, the fresh-faced Fort Bliss soldier who recently married her mother. The winner gets to live.

The Mad Dog Blues
Hip Pocket Theatre, May 16-June 8
Take an adventure trip through America's mythology, traversing through Sam Shepard's work like never seen before.

Patti Lupone: A Life in Notes
AT&T Performing Arts Center, May 24
Three-time Tony Award winner Patti LuPone describes her new concert as a “personal musical memoir,” and what a memoir she has. Lupone takes to the stage with her longtime musical director Joseph Thalken to celebrate, through song, her legendary career.

STOMP
AT&T Performing Arts Center, May 31-June 1
STOMP is explosive, inventive, provocative, witty, and utterly unique. The international percussion sensation features an eight-member troupe that uses everything but conventional percussion instruments — like matchboxes, wooden poles, brooms, garbage cans, Zippo lighters, hubcaps — to fill the stage with magnificent rhythms.

Cats
Casa Mañana, May 31-June 8
Known for its spectacular music, mesmerizing choreography and costuming, and innovative storytelling, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tony Award-winning Cats is one of the longest-running Broadway musicals of all time. As a tribe of cats called the Jellicles gather for the annual Jellicle Ball, find out who will be chosen to be reborn into a new Jellicle life.

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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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A good listen

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