At the moment, because performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and rehearsals for A Christmas Carol are overlapping, the Dallas Theater Center is currently employing 39 actors.
And all of them seem to be local.

MINING THE PAST: “You learn more from reading than from reading books on writing.” That’s the strategy that Southlake author Suzanne Crowley says guided her to a successful career as a young-adult author. Her second book in the genre, The Stolen One, is set in Tudor England and was inspired by the many books she [...]

THE MAN AT THE MIC: Most actors playing the lead in Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio would be content to just perfect the ungodly amount of dialogue they have to learn for the show. But Elias Taylorson wanted his experience with Upstart Productions’ staging of the play to be more immersive. To that end, he also [...]

Guest blogger Josh Greenfield is a junior at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He plays Snug the Joiner in the Dallas Theater Center’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Read his previous post here.

Preview week was really crazy. The morning after the first preview, Paul Baker passed away, and [...]

MERRY WIDOWS: Jubilee Theatre’s Dance on Widow’s Row finds that death can be quite a funny thing – especially if there is a lot of it.  The setting for the show is a dinner party in which a group of widows play host to a few potential husbands/prey. “Given that the quartet of widows who [...]

Where exactly does one go these days to buy a Nazi flag?
That’s the question that was on my mind after taking in Upstart Productions‘ staging of Talk Radio. The play’s about a talk show host named Barry Champlain (played with vinegar in the veins by Elias Taylorson). He hosts a late-night call-in show, and he’s [...]

THE BEST IN BOOKS: A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Big Horn, the Last Great Battle of the American West, by Dallas author James Donovan, was named best non-fiction book by the Writers’ League of Texas. Mike Merschel of the DMN’s Texas Pages books blog has the complete list. He’ll be in Austin covering [...]

– it’s now online as one of Gary Cogill’s WFAA videos, all 20 breathless minutes of it (” “magnificent!” is pretty much how the prose starts). Mighty cool visuals, though. A first look at that rooftop logo, for instance, with a big aerial reverse zoom that makes Cogill look like a tiny bridegroom figure topping [...]

SMU professor Willard Spiegelman is usually busy talking about what makes him happy (as he did this spring on Think TV). So it’s a bit of a switch that he writes in today’s Wall Street Journal about what he’s currently unhappy with – namely, life in downtown Dallas.

Of course, you’ve probably read (or heard about) Edwin Heathcote’s takedown of the entire Arts District in the Financial Times. A tad overstated, perhaps, because Heathcote sees no viable model for a city except the classic European one: Dallas’ downtown, he writes, “is a melange of defunct US tropes: mirror-glazed blank-slab offices, massive multi-storey carparks, [...]