The queens of ‘Priscilla’

It is a small perturbation that the two longest-running Broadway musicals about drag queens — La Cage aux Folles and Priscilla Queen of the Desert, now playing at Fair Park Music Hall — involved plots where gay men have ill-advised sex with women and produce sons, only hoping not to embarrass their offspring. My guess is, this is done intentionally, to remind mainstream hetero audiences that gay or straight, we are all basically the same (as if showing our emotions weren’t already enough).

Still, you can practically hear the jaws drop inside the auditorium during many of the numbers of Priscilla, which makes La Cage look like a church social by comparison. Its outrageousness is less offensive and shocking than merely unbridled: It’s out-and-proud about its camp factor, and you’d better adjust or stay away.

Adjust. Do, do adjust, because Priscilla is a hoot, as glamorously trashy and enjoyable as the best drag show you’ve ever seen. Some people didn’t stay through Act 2; that was their loss.

The namesake bus

Three drag performers — gay men Mitzi (Wade McCollum, the one with the aforementioned offspring) and Felicia (Bryan West), and trans woman Bernadette (Scott Willis) —travel the Australian Outback in an elaborate bus on their way to a gig in a remote casino town. Along the way they encounter gay-bashers, weirdos, aborigines, looky-loo tourists, sex workers and, mercifully, tolerant, average folks who embrace differences rather than judge them. It’s the point of the show. (It’s the point of La Cage, too.) I found it telling that the first audience members I saw bail during the performance did so in the midst of a touching rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s song of tolerance, “True Colors.” It was as if those people couldn’t stand the idea they might feel empathy for a man in a dress.

Lauper songs appear elsewhere in Priscilla, a jukebox musical without original tunes but which shoehorns them into the story as they serve both the drag acts and illuminate the characters. Most are ’80s pop and disco numbers, though Mitzi’s version of “Always on My Mind” resonates on a different level as an expression of fatherly love.

But sentiment aside, it’s the fabulosity that carries the show, from the opening number “It’s Raining Men” (followed by a dead-on Tina Turner impersonation) to the scandalous “ping pong ball” routine (unforgettable) to some of the best sets and costumes you’ll ever see. Priscilla is hardly a perfect show, but you accept it for what it is, and gladly. That’s all it asks.

Runs through May 26. Get tickets here.

So Help Me God!, a re-discovered 1929 comedy by Maurine Dallas Watkins (Aug. 8–Sept. 1). The author best known for the play on which the musical Chicago was based wrote this equally racy tale of back-stabbing divas.

Assassins, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by John Weidman (Sept. 26–Oct. 27). The gay composer’s oft-praised but infrequently performed Tony Award winner will reach Dallas in time for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. It tells the stories of famous political murderers and wannabes, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley.

Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz (Nov. 21–Dec. 15). This recent Tony nominee from the gay creator of Brothers & Sisters makes its Southwestern premiere about family conflict.

On the Eve, music and lyrics by Seth Magill and Shawn Magill, book by Michael Federico (Jan. 16–Feb. 9, 2014). Already announced as playing this season, this production revives a show staged locally last year at Fair Park’s Margo Jones Lounge, pictured, was my No. 1 show of 2012.

Less Than Kind by Terence Rattigan (Mar. 6–30, 2014). This play by the late, gay British playwright, well-known for such classics as The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, will receive its American debut after being forgotten for decades after the playwright died.

Seminar by Theresa Rebeck (Apr. 24–May 18, 2014). I saw the Broadway version of this play by Smash creator Rebeck last year, and it’s juicy, hilarious stuff getting its Southwest premiere.

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark by  Lynn Nottage (June 19–July 13, 2014). The story of a headstrong African-American actress from the 1930s.

Additionally, Theatre Too will continue to run Avenue Q until audiences grow weary (no sign of that yet), or January, when the gay-authored I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change returns for a month-long run.

A half-dozen or so disaffected New Yorkers, linked together by fate or coincidence, sing about coping with death, loneliness, aimlessness. If that sounds like Rent, or even Avenue Q … well, it’s not, but it is just as smart and entertaining, with a little big of Robert Altman thrown in.

Fly By Night, a newish musical making its regional debut at the Kalita thanks to Dallas Theater Center, combines elements and tones culled freely from The Twilight Zone, Spring Awakening, Magnolia, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, (500) Days of Summer and chamber musicals like those of Jonathan Larson and William Finn and Little Shop, to create a spiritual but not ponderously didactic piece that plays with lovely insight within the intimate space of the Kalita. (I imagine it working well in the black box of the Wyly, too.)

It’s November 1964 — the era of Mad Men — and the sole foray by schlubby Harold (Damon Daunno, pictured left with Michael McCormick) into advertising is misspelling the sign on his boss’ sandwich shop. Harold meets Daphne (Whitney Bashor), a perky transplant from South Dakota, and falls for her fast. But Daphne’s mousy older sister Miriam (Kristin Stokes), resignedly alone, meets a fortune teller who predicts she and Harold are meant to be together … and that it won’t end happily. (It doesn’t.) Everything in their lives, though, seems to be zeroing in on that day in 1965 when the Eastern Seaboard went black due to a power outage, and the fortunes of everyone were changed.

This is the kind of show where even its weaknesses exude a goofy likability. The second act is easily 20 minutes too long, and the character of an aimless playwright is a waste of actor Alex Organ’s sizeable talents. (The entire plot about a constantly revised play-within-a-play comes off as excessively twee.) You also want to spend more time with Harold’s father (David Coffee), although his last-act solo makes the wait worth it.

Fly By Night casts a spell on you in any number of ways, from the melodic appeal of the Disney-esque songs (“I Need More” and “I Am a Turtle” linger, as do the voices of their singers) to the appealing actors to Bill Fennelly’s creative staging. And it does all this not by dazzling, but by reassuring us of the beauty of life even in those moments of desperation. It makes living in the dark of the universe not seem so scary.

— Arnold Wayne Jones

Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd. Through  May 26. DallasTheaterCenter.org.

This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition May 10, 2013.

ARNOLD WAYNE JONES  | Life+Style Editor

The last time most North Texas audiences got to see Wade McCollum, he was slithering around in a pair of tight-fitting pants (and little else) in Dallas Theater Center’s production of Cabaret.

When he returns this week, you’ll see a very different side of him.

“You know what I look like in nothing,” he says. “Now you’ll know what I look like in drag.”

And not just any drag. McCollum headlines the national tour of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, a jukebox musical so full of outlandish costumes it does them a disservice to call them “just” costumes.

“They are more than costumes — they are engineered creations,” says McCollum, who plays Mitzi (the Hugo weaving character from the film). “The seeds of all the ideas are in the film. But here you’ll see the trees and all the fruit.”

Michelle Harrison, a Dallas native and costume director for the national tour, confirms the scope.

“I’m responsible for five [tours] right now, and Priscilla has the most costumes by far. There are just under 500 total costumes — and that’s taking a costume of one person’s individual look, not all the pieces that make it up, or for the swings or understudies,” she says. “It takes up a 53-foot semi-truck. Costumes are transported in rolling closets called gondolas; most shows have 10 to 20 gondolas. Priscilla has about 40.

It’s huge.

“I should finally just count my own costumes,” McCollum admits. “I counted once while walking to a party; I think I came up with 20 to 22 costume changes [for me], some of which are, like, 30 seconds long.”

But does McCollum have a favorite look among his wardrobe.

“There are so many great costumes, but I’d have to say the finale — where we wear these huge Marie Antoinette dresses — is really more of an emergency shelter than a dress. It’s 7 feet wide, with a huge metal skirt and 5-foot-tall wig that represents the ocean with the Santa Maria on top.”

That’s not even the most outrageous thing. When all the actors come together, domes come arching up over their heads and together they create the Sydney Opera House. “It’s one of those moments when you say, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’” says McCollum.

That’s a surprise especially when you consider the low-budget Aussie film — about three drag queens road-tripping it to the Australian Outback in a bus they christen Priscilla, only to shock, upset and occasionally delight a series of baffled locals along the way — notoriously had one of the cheapest costume budgets ever imagined: $15,000 (out of an overall budget of $1 million). The costume budget for the Broadway version? Reportedly half a million alone, “if not a little more,” confirms Harrison. “Everything from the shoes to the wigs is of excellent quality, but there is also stuff from the dollar store, which works, because the three queens don’t have any money, either.” (The iconic $7 flip-flop dress from the film — which was instrumental in winning designers Tim Chappell and Lizzie Gardiner the Oscar — is in the stage production’s Tony Award-winning costumes as well.)

Indeed, one of the directives given to Harrison and company in constructing the costumes for the tour was not to make them look “too nice.”

“It’s definitely something we have to keep in mind, especially with the shoes. When we finished them, they looked too good — we needed to make them look a little dirty, a little used.”

Harrison’s own fave among the costumes varies depending on her mood.

“Definitely one of my favorite and one of the hardest to create were the cupcakes — big, bulky and hard to fit. We put them on the actors 12, maybe 14 times before we readjusted them right.

And I love that flip-flop dress. But where I am now, I am in awe of all the shoes. They are amazing.”

An ironic thing about the national tour is: It’s easy to attract New York audiences to a Broadway production with drag; but has art imitated life? Has this road show production of kitschy flamboyance and uber-gay characters wooed folks in the hinterlands or delighted them?

Definitely the latter, says McCollum.

“They say if it plays in Peoria, you have a hit,” he says. “Well, we have all been incredibly surprised at the deafening roar of the crowds every night. Sure, some people may not relate to [drag queens per se], but on a fundamental level it’s about humans: An older woman finding love, a young kid who can’t be as radical as he wants to be, a father afraid of rejection. It’s the trope of belonging, the beauty of diversity. Audiences find themselves relating to [the characters] as people.”

But the camp certainly plays a role.

“Hey,” McCollum says, “seeing the show is like being inside a drag queen’s imagination for a night. Who doesn’t want to be there?”

This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition May 10, 2013.

KEEPING UP WITH THE JONES | At 61, Bill T. Jones, above, choreographed, directed and co-wrote ‘Fela!,’ opposite … and has no plans to slow down.

ARNOLD WAYNE JONES  | Life+Style Editor

Although he’s best known as a choreographer, Bill T. Jones would probably resist applying any label to what he does that inhibits his creative expression.

As the surviving founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, he revolutionized dance — notably with Still/Here, which explored the impact of AIDS on the body — and won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant along the way.

But a few years ago, he moved from the esoteric world of dance to the pop sensibilities of Broadway, choreographing Spring Awakening (and winning a Tony).
Apparently, the theater bug’s bite is strong, because he returned with Fela!, a dance-heavy musical he choreographed, directed, co-wrote and developed.

Nobody puts Billy in a corner.

“I don’t just stage dances,” Jones insists. “My dances often have text in them. I work from the ground up. But Broadway is its own animal — the demands make it that.”

Fela!, which opened at the Winspear this week, wasn’t an obvious sell to American audiences.

Then again, Jones specializes in stretching boundaries, and his passion carries it.

Based on the life of African musician and nationalist activist Fela Kuti — who helped define the Afrobeat sound in the 1960s and ‘70s before succumbing to AIDS in 1997 — Fela! is an exhausting voyage through politics, music and movement, much of which would be unfamiliar to Americans. But Jones’ interest in Fela started decades ago.

“I had been a member of a dance collective in Binghamton, N.Y., in the 1970s, and one of our teachers went to a library looking for some African music,” Jones recalls. “The teacher was drawn to this colorful album and got it. We played it a great deal and began to follow his story, including his incarceration at that time. I imagined it like a rock star [in the U.S.] being thrown in jail.”

Flashforward a few decades, and an American theater producer was looking for someone to tell Fela’s story. “Our shared lawyer had seen my work at the Guthrie Theater [in Minneapolis] and told him about it,” Jones says. They met, “and he said, ‘I think you are the guy.’”

It took a lot longer than that to get the show off the ground, however.

Casting was a huge hurdle. The actor playing Fela commands the stage for more than two hours, sweating like a racehorse. It would require back-up casting to keep the show fresh every night.

And there weren’t many actors who could pull it off anyway. (He eventually enlisted Sahr Ngaujah, who won a Tony nom for his performance.) Then came the process of culling through Fela’s music and selecting not just pieces that would aid in the story, but rewriting the songs for a wider audience.

“We had to find a way to change and translate [Fela’s] lyrics,” Jones says. “His music was often sung in pidgin English or other [African dialects]. But that whole generation of Afrobeat musicians consider them sacred,” and didn’t want to mess with them. They eventually found a balance that worked.

Initially, Jones saw the production as something like his other dance work. “We thought Fela! should be the hip, downtown thing — showing in Brooklyn, or as a weekend show, building a rep” among the New York tastemakers. But commercial theater beckoned.

“We were off-Broadway at 37 Arts and said, ‘Let’s put it up on its feet.’ [As soon as it opened,] people were lining up down the block.  I went on vacation and didn’t know it had been as successful as it was.”

The move to B’way was natural, but required even more changes — including lopping at least 20 minutes from its runtime. “We were freaked out by it but it was exciting,” Jones says. “Songs that we fell in love with, that talked about that period, eventually had to go to shape a commercial theater run even though they were very close to our heart.”

Fela! closed on Broadway in 2011, but the national tour continues to represent Jones’ vision. He does not travel with the show, however: He remains busy with his dance company, serving as executive director of another arts group and even continues his B’way career. Now at age 61, you might expect Jones to be looking toward retirement. He scoffs.

“You’re thinking of normal people,” he says. “Artists don’t think that way.”

This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition May 10, 2013.

It’s odd, that gut muscle memory that causes you to heave ever-so-slightly when you see the dramatization of such boondoggle buzzwords as credit-default swap, derivatives, energy trading, deregulation and even “irrational exuberance.” (The show uses a lot of multi-media elements, including Dow Jones ticker scrolls and audio-visual echoes from the 1990s.) You sense pangs of guilt by association for being in the room with Fastow (David Goodwin) as he shares with Skilling (Chris Hury) his plan to prop up Enron’s stock with a corporate shell game of shell corporations. The audience has the benefit of 20/20 hindsight to know where the plan in headed, but you can’t help but feel contempt for those in the room with them who didn’t say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” It’s as if everyone was too stupid — or too greedy — to call foul on the emperor’s new clothes.

The sweep of the greed planned in boardrooms in Houston to generate false “profits” by claiming victory before the clock counted down (Skilling’s idea, basically, was the record as “profit” the potential windfall of a deal before an actual money had changed hands, thereby rewarding entrepreneurship in closing a deal at the expense of making sure it was a good deal) staggers the imagination. And in Theatre 3′s compelling production, directed by Jeffrey Schmidt, we sit there gape-mouthed as the horrors are visited upon everyday stockholders duped by monsters in blue serge.

Like, say, Chicago, the play is full of the funhouse elements, including marionettes, song and dance, puppets and fantasy to approximate the carnival atmosphere that led to the downfall. But Theatre 3′s production is most memorable for its performances, especially Hury as the voracious egotist Skilling, Doug Jackson (his best work ever) as a sadly sympathetic Ken Lay and Jennifer Boswell as Claudia Roe, the lone woman who was the Cassandra of Enron officer, hectoring them about the fallacy of invented money and manipulation to create perceived value while the authentic bases of business were ignored.

Sadly, even 11 years after the meltdown, the rules promulgated at Enron dominate American business. We “learned” a lot from what Skilling at Co. did — but we haven’t learned anything.

Through May 25.

TooManyGirls by Jamie Jamison

Last weekend’s opening performance of the 1930s Rodgers & Hart musical Too Many Girls was the first time an audience had seen a live production of that show since it closed on Broadway in 1940 (it ran a respectable seven months and introduced us — and Lucille Ball — to a new singer named Desi Arnaz.) Let’s just say that the world has not been horribly deprived by the intervening lapse. Lorenz Hart died a few years later (and he and Richard Rodgers produced their best show, Pal Joey, leaving Rodgers to team with Oscar Hammerstein for a truly legendary run). Too Many Girls was too cutesy-poo once the genius of Oklahoma! reinvented what a musical could be three years later.

It isn’t that the music in Girls is bad (although the song “Cuz We Got Cake” easily stands as one of the dumber numbers I’ve ever heard) or that the script is lame (it pretty much is — a silly confection about college football stars who give up their athletic dreams to follow a single girl to a co-ed school in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico); it’s that there’s not much there there in any event: Songs are meant to be fun, not really tell a story, and there’s virtually no character development as a sorority of virgins at Pottawatomie U. (a name that sounds like Bullwinkle’s alma mater) blue-ball the football players.

But some of it works, including the opening number (“Heroes in the Fall”) and some charming performances by John Campione (in Desi’s role) and Daron Cockerell, channeling Carol Burnett (I’d love to hear her sing “I’m Shy” from Once Upon a Mattress some day). And kudos, as usual, to Lyric Stage for continuing to produce musicals on a grand scale … even if sometimes the shows themselves aren’t as deserving of such white-glove treatment as others.

Runs through Sunday.

Wait a minute … aren’t they still?

That’s sometimes the magic of theater: A story that seems rooted in its time continues to resonate for decades later, even when the iconography seems different: Athletes wearing socks up to the knee, people using pay phones, hairdos that haven’t been fashionable since the Reagan Administration. The playwright, Lanford Wilson, speaks about the human condition so simply and honestly, the look matters less than the feeling.

There’s plenty of feeling in this production at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, directed forthrightly by Rene Moreno. Six folks — college prof Niles (James Crawford) and his young wife Vita (Allison Pistorius), art collector Marion (Sue Loncar) and her boy-toy tennis pro Zappy (Jake Buchanan), and squirrelly genius Don (Ivan Jasso) and his foster parent, Father Doherty (H. Francis Fuselier) — spend an afternoon together in a remote New Mexico mission. The roads are impassable due to a problem at the nearby nuclear reactor. Are these the end times? Or just a reminded that we’re always on the brink?

Angels Fall is the old-school “comedy-drama” in the best sense. Interpersonal relationships fuel the exposition, not vice-versa: We learn about Niles’ mental breakdown and Don’s ambivalence about his future organically, without contrivance or melodrama. (The most theatrical bit is the coincidence that brings them all to church, a completely forgivable conceit.) There’s a richness and authenticity undergirding the lives of these people.

A lot of that is Moreno’s legendary skills at storytelling, but much rests with the cast. The strained marriage between Niles and Vita is brittly parsed by Crawford and Pistorius, and Buchanan gets in man comic riffs; his May-December romance with Loncar feels real. And Fuselier’s whimsical, leprechaunish befuddlement scores over and over.

Rodney Dobbs’ set is amazing, too, but it’s what’s inside that works. Wilson was a prolific playwright who’s seldom talked about in reverential tones; with productions like this (and the recent The Madness of Lady Bright), he may receive the critical reevaluation he deserves.

MAKE ’EM LAUGH | Val Kilmer finally returns to comedy in his new show at the Wyly.

When Val Kilmer looks you directly in the eyes — and, cobra-like, he never seems to break a connection with you — it’s difficult not to be charmed. Still handsome at 53, this bushy-eyebrowed actor held his own opposite Tom Cruise in Top Gun, DeNiro and Pacino in Heat and Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau; he took over the iconic role of Batman, only to walk away from the franchise despite excellent reviews; he renewed interest in Method Acting following acclaimed turns as Jim Morrison in The Doors and Doc Holliday in Tombstone. And then, almost out of nowhere, he dropped out of sight.

“I didn’t fall off the map,” Kilmer corrects,

“I tumbled down the Grand Canyon.”

You might say, reports of the death of his career have been greatly exaggerated. For much of the past decade, Kilmer has taken mostly character roles in indie films; he hasn’t headlined a big-budget Hollywood film since the sci-fi flop Red Planet in 2000.

“I went from a Top 10 box office star to getting out of the system,” Kilmer offers from the lobby of the Wyly Theatre. And most significant of all? He’s totally OK with that.

“I was trying to be a responsible parent,” he says. “I don’t have any regrets.”

Kilmer was less a part of the Tinseltown machine than his fame might suggest. He started in theater, and has no problem coming back to it, as he does this week with the one-man show Citizen Twain, which Kilmer wrote and stars in as the legendary humorist. It’s not as much as a stretch as you might think. Kilmer wrote two plays back in his high school and college days, and when you see him in full makeup, it’s easy to be lost in the illusion.

And if you think of Kilmer as serious, well, you don’t remember his earliest movies: The spy spoof Top Secret! and the teen comedy Real Genius. (Also check out Kilmer as a gay detective opposite Robert Downey Jr. in 2005’s darkly comic Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.)

“I would’ve liked to have more comedies,” Kilmer sighs. “Hollywood is very finicky — they like to understand and make money off of known commodities.” By breaking away from the machine, Kilmer gets to reapproach his career on his own terms.

“I was looking for a film to write and happened upon something that would engage me for the many years it takes to get a project off the ground,” he explains. “I found this story, which captivated me. It’s a story about America, but also about the likes of Mark Twain and [Christian Science founder] Mary Baker Eddy. Twain was fascinated by Mrs. Eddy — she was the most quoted person of the 19th century in her time. He was jealous of her, I think.”

Of course, Kilmer not only has to combat preconceived ideas about being a dramatic movie star while doing a comedy in the theater; he also competes with the iconic role created 50 years ago by Hal Holbrook in a series of one-man shows about Twain.

“Holbrook has been so supportive of my vision,” says Kilmer. “He’s made my job really easy — many people know of Mark Twain because of Hal Holbrook!”

But Holbrook is now 82, and unlikely to perform the role much in the future. And Kilmer understands the burden of being associated too closely with one role.

“People come up to me all the time and say, ‘Your Jim Morrison is more Jim Morrison than Jim Morrison!’ That doesn’t make sense to me — I don’t think Jim Morrison knew who Jim Morrison was!”

Ultimately, portraying Twain is just part of the actor’s craft: A character study and love story with a dual perspective.

Kilmer is committed to four performances of the show, with the opportunity to expand to as many as 10 performances, based on demand.

“Dallas is a sophisticated city,” Kilmer says. “You get humor — hopefully [audiences] will laugh more than they did in New York City or Berkeley. I have never had something dramatic as satisfying as writing a joke and having it hit onstage.”

— Arnold Wayne Jones

This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition April 19, 2013.

Kelsey Ervi hasn’t been out of school for even two years, and already she’s stomping out a vintage with her young career in theater.

The Waco native moved to Dallas in 2011 after graduating from Baylor. Obviously, she just couldn’t get enough Waco. Yeah, right.

“I grew up there, which is scary for someone who is gay,” Ervi says. “I was like, ‘I gotta get out of here.’”

But despite the Texas town’s conservative rep, Ervi says she got a great education in the theater department there, which was very open-minded. It also taught her how to do almost anything in theater — in front of the footlights and behind.

“The theater department was so wonderful,” she coos. “I acted, directed, wrote.”

Ervi continues to work as a jack-of-all-trades: Her first play produced, Waking Up, debuted at WaterTower Theatre’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival last year. Set in a bedroom, with 11 characters, it explored pillow talk in the modern age. The success of that show landed Ervi a permanent job in Dallas, as assistant to Terry Martin, the producing artistic director at WTT.

Moving to Dallas has given Ervi renewed energy about the potential of doing good work in the theater. Martin, one of the most respected directors in town, asked Ervi to assistant direct WTT’s current show, The Grapes of Wrath.

“My education at Baylor was great, but the tactile experience [working here] is a whole world of knowledge,” she says. “Grapes of Wrath is such a massive show. Terry has worked with the [Joad family cast members] and I’m working with the ensemble.”

Grapes just adds to her resume. Not only has she worked with Martin, but her career already includes several stints with the dean of North Texas’ theater directors, Rene Moreno, as both assistant director or stage manager on August: Osage County, Twelfth Night and The Lucky Chance.

“It’s such a learning experience,” Ervi says. “Rene is a wonderful teacher; he’ll [do something] then whisper to me, ‘This is why I’m doing this.’”

Ervi is continuing to write (she’s working right now on a three-woman show about the trials and tribulations of love and sex; she hopes to finish it over the summer), and she’s open to auditioning to act in a show “if I feel like I’m right for it.” But mostly she’s just happy to be pursuing her passion professionally.

“I love Dallas — it’s such a booming theater community,” she says. “Classmates talk about moving to New York, and I say, ‘Come to Dallas! It’s great here.’”

The Grapes of Wrath runs through April 28.

Re-Designing Women. When Jamie Morris writes a spoof, he doesn’t hold back. Even before the actors come onstage for the first scene of Re-Designing Women, Morris’ send-up of the ’80s-era sitcom Designing Women, we’re treated to an “opening credits” video to remind us of the tone and characters. Of course, once the show begins (which is does at the Rose Room most Fridays and Saturdays for the next month-and-a-half), we simply revert, like muscle memory, to knowing who we’re seeing.

It’s the present day, and Sugarbakers Designs is going strong … well, not so strong. They’ve fallen on hard times. Finances are so bad, Suzanne (Ashton Shawver) has tricked the others into appearing on a Bravo reality show, Sugar Walls. They’re all mortified, until the show becomes a hit and Mary Jo (Chad Peterson) and Charlene (Michael B. Moore, whose vocal impersonation borders on the uncanny) become rivals while Bernice (Mikey Abrams) becomes the break-out star.

Morris, who also plays the stentorian Julia, has a knack for capturing the essence of a show while simultaneously updating it. Thus, there are tacky (but hilarious) jokes about “Sarah Palin’s half-wit baby” and the contemporary exacerbations that rankle Julia, including the cross-eyed Bravo producer Andy Cohen (Kevin Moore). (If you follow the ModernSeinfeld Twitter feed, you get the idea.) And while Morris never hesitates to push the line a bit too far (fart jokes!), this play — following Mommie Queerest, The Facts of Life: The Lost Episode and The Silence of the Clams — is probably his best writing: The characters are sharply drawn and even better performed. And when Morris recites one of Julia’s famous speeches from the TV days (her “Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” riff), fully half the folks in the Rose Room seemed to recite along. That’s called knowing your audience.

John Michael and the Order of the Penix. Jamie Morris was in the audience the same night I was for the opening of Penix, and he summarized what most people probably think when the come out in one word: Fearless. For 90 minutes (too long, but that’s another matter), John Michael single-handedly regales anyone who will watch him roam around the lobby (and, eventually, stage) of the Magnolia Lounge will his confessional fantasy: A combination of memoir and feverdream, John Michael talks frankly about living as a young gay man in today’s Dallas: Hooking up on Grindr, volunteering for GayBingo and being oddly obsessed with Harry Potter. Hogwarts begins to enter his consciousness (reality or not? He never seems sure) as John Michael “learns” that Harry and much of the rest of the non-Muggle population has contracted HIV. (The death of Hagrid is especially a blow to the bear community, he notes.)

John Michael knows no second gear: He sets his show on “play” until it’s over. Sometimes, it could use a fast-forward, especially when he smirks at his own cleverness and in the excessive use of food onstage. (Hey, this is “performance art,” not strictly a play — if there’s weren’t interaction with the audience and messy foodstuffs, it wouldn’t be “alternative.”) The ending veers toward the mawkish. But damn if you don’t spend most of the performance agog at John Michael’s energy, his youthful talent (he turned 25 earlier this week), his bravery and his skill. This is a guy who’s going places, and The Order of the Penix is a step down that road with him. How often do you get to be the Scarecrow tagging along with Dorothy? Catch him this weekend before you’re woulda-coulda-ing yourself.

Wicked. Speaking of Dorothy, she makes only a cameo appearance in shadow in Wicked, which Dallas Summer Musicals has brought back for a four-week run at Fair Park Music Hall. The story here, as fans of this musical phenomenon well know, is what happened with the witches of Oz before a Kansas farmgirl flew her house on the wings of a cyclone.

If you’ve seen it before — and chances are, you have — I don’t need to convince you it’s a worthy, expansive musical with a great book, a better score and lush production values. This version has all that. And the dueling witches — green Elphaba (Dee Roscioli) and perky Galinda (Jenn Bambatese) have chemistry, though sometimes they and the others need to project more, even when miked. This time, however, I was drawn to Madame Morrible (Guiding Light veteran Kim Zimmer); and while Curt Hansen, who plays leading man Fiyero, has an unmistakable boy-band quality to his singing, he also has boy-band looks. He’s the most swoon-worthy of Fiyeros I’ve seen — it’s enough to send you over the rainbow.

Rx. You’ll go farther than that with Kitchen Dog’s new show, one of the freshest comedies in a while. Once again, it’s a showcase for Tina Parker, who plays high-strung damaged heroines better than about anyone on Dallas stages. Rx is a dark romantic comedy about Big Pharma, where a woman with debilitating anxiety enters an experimental drug program to combat workplace depression. She ends up in a prickly entanglement with her doctor (Max Hartman), who himself isn’t all that stable.

Kate Fodor’s play has a lot of smart observations about modern society, bureaucracy, foot fetishes and the prescription drug culture, and has an ally in director Christopher Carlos in telling it well; a descending screen of granny panties triggers a laugh every time it happens, and Rx has, hands-down, the best onstage sex scene I’ve ever witnessed. And with Parker and Hartman, plus intensely funny work from Martha Harms and John M. Flores, this is one show that’s good for what ails ya.