Tag Archives: Pride Performing Arts Festival

Uptown Players’ Dallas Pride Performing Arts Festival: A sneak peek

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Uptown Players presents its second annual Dallas Pride Performing Arts Festival just in time for Pride, starting tonight with the one-night-only staging of Dustin Lance Black’s 8, but there are seven more shows scheduled — all with a gay twist of some sort, and all getting multiple performances.

Below is a run-down of the shows … some with write-ups by others in the festival. You can get individual tickets ($13) — or a full festival pass ($53) — here. All performances upstairs in Frank’s Place at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd.

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—  Arnold Wayne Jones

Gay Texas playwright wins award

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Allan Baker, the Austin-based playwright whose play Click was performed last year at the inaugural Pride Performing Arts Festival, was chosen as best play at the ninth annual Hurricane Season New Play Festival and Playwrighting Competition in Los Angeles earlier this month. It tied for the top spot with another play.

The L.A. production was the third for the play, which debuted in Austin in the spring of 2010 and got its second staging at the Kalita last fall. In it, two young men log on to the Internet to meet up … but for vastly different reasons.

—  Arnold Wayne Jones

Uptown Players announces lineup for second Dallas Pride Performing Arts Festival

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Last year, Uptown Players launched its first-ever Pride Performing Arts Festival to coincide with the Dallas Pride celebration. It was a hit, and the festival is coming back for a 10-day series of gay plays and performances.

Already announced will be the regional premiere of 8, the play by Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black based on the actual transcript of the challenge to California’s Proposition 8 law, banning same-sex marriage. Rene Moreno will direct the staged reading in the Kalita Humphreys main stage. (Sept. 6.)

Also on the main stage will be Songs for a New World, a song cycle by composer Jason Robert Brown, directed by Bruce Coleman and music directed by Kevin Gunther. (Sept. 9, 11 and 15.) [EDITOR'S NOTE: Uptown Players has announced that Songs for a New World has been removed from the schedule.]

The remaining shows will all be performed in Frank’s Place, the upstairs venue at the Kalita. Among the lineup:

• Speech & Debate, about three teenaged misfits united by a town sex scandal. (Sept. 7, 8 and 10.)

• The Madness of Lady Bright, starring Larry Randolph as a drag queen slowly going insane; it played last year at the Festival of Independent Theatres, winning Randolph awards for his performance. (Sept. 8, 9 and 15.)

• Still Consummate, in which master comedienne Marisa Diotalevi, pictured, revisits her award-winning one-person show The Consummate Woman. It will be on a double bill with Paul J. Williams’ standup act Triple Crown Queen, about growing up gay. (Sept. 8, 11 and 14.)

• A-GAYS, Stillwater, Oklahoma. Young performance artist John Michael Colgin reprises his one-man show about being gay at OSU, and the ptifalls of finding a boyfriend. (Sept. 8, 9 and 15.)

• Why Am I Not Gay. Straight guy Jason Kane loves musical theater and looks like a bear on the prowl at a Hidden Door beer bush, but — gasp! — prefers girls. He pokes fun at the stereotypes of gay folks, and being on the other side of them. (Sept. 9, 12 and 15.)

• I Google Myself, which played a few years back at WaterTower’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, will return. This comedy is about a man who finds he shares the same name with a porn star. Kookiness ensures. (Sept. 9, 13 and 15.)

—  Arnold Wayne Jones