Gary Laird

QUACK playwright Eliza Clark is very good at sharp, rapid-fire dialogue, and she gives the actors plenty.

The Houston Ballet, after a year of touring various Houston venues while awaiting the refurbishment of the flood-damaged Wortham Theatre Center, makes a triumphant return in Stanton Welch's THE NUTCRACKER.

Agatha Christie's THE MOUSETRAP, now playing at the Alley Theatre, is a theatrical phenomenon.

A DARKER SWAN LAKE GLIDES ONTO HOUSTON'S JONES HALL STAGE

What can one say about a 90-minute play in which every other line is a punch line, and the plot really doesn't matter? I guess I'll find out.

The writer and director are to be congratulated for managing to tell the story fully in one 80-minute, no-intermission production.

Planned a year ago as the opening of their 2017-18 season, no one had any inkling how ironic the title HARVEY would be. Playwright Mary Chase's merry little romp seemed like a good idea at the time. And as it turned out, it was.

Houston has had its share of drama in the last few short weeks, and the city's downtown theater venues are reeling from the blow.

The Houston Ballet's season opener MAYERLING Brings Drama to Life at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts.

If you have any dull hatchets lying around, I suggest you bring them along. There are axe-grindings galore on the stage in this play by Catherine Trieschmann, now playing a summer run at the Obsidian Theater.

Chill out. Alfred Hitchcock's THE 39 STEPS is at the Alley.

It's a show business aphorism that the meaning of the musical PIPPIN, first produced on Broadway in 1972, is anybody's guess. I can go along with that.

FREAKY FRIDAY, a new musical from Disney, is based on the 1976 original movie and 2003 remake of the same name. It's a simple premise. Career mother and teenage daughter don't get along. (Stop me if you've heard this one.)

The Houston Ballet brings one of the most theatrical of the Bard's plays to life in a lavish production by choreographer David Bintley. No expense was spared; no stop un-pulled in this story of love, revenge, magic, and complicated skullduggery that this play provides in abundance. Or maybe overabundance.

KURIOS, Cabinet of Curiosities, written and directed by Michel Laprise, creates a world vaguely 19th-century, with overtones of the French filmmaker Georges Melies. It's a world populated by fantastic beings, all going about their business with a will, whatever that business may be. It doesn't really matter though, because your disbelief is suspended from the first scene.

For those of you who may have been wondering about God's whereabouts, or worrying about his well-being, I can now report that he's alive and well and doing stand-up at the Alley Theatre.

Houston Ballet's program of three contemporary ballets, running now at THE WORTHAM CENTER, is breath-taking. This is the first of many adjectives I will reach for in this review. I may run out, but you'll get the drift.

The latest iteration of the production on tour is crafted with care and performed with verve. It's an 'old-fashioned' Broadway staple, and it never wears out its welcome. It unabashedly tugs at the heartstrings, tickles the funny bone and jerks the tears, just as it did when it opened 66 years ago this month. Few musicals achieve this kind of longevity, and more than a few of those are from the pens of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

In this retelling of the beloved fairy tale, pretty much everything is thrown out the window for a darker, edgier story of an independent woman fighting against her circumstances for a chance at a better life.

Josephine reigns supreme in THE LAST NIGHT OF JOSEPHINE BAKER.