Elizabeth Marshall

Dirt Dogs Theatre Co. will conclude its 2023-24 main stage season of “nature vs. nurture” with the Houston premiere of Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Directed by Ron Jones, this riveting play explores family secrets, racial tensions, and cultural identity.

The George Theater is presenting A Texas Carol this holiday season. A Texas Carol is a zany and heartfelt ode to families that despite their dysfunction somehow manage to keep moving forward in love. Learn how to purchase tickets!

PRESENT LAUGHTER gets a stunning revival at Main Street Theater with a returning director and leading man remounting the show with a power packed cast. The Noel Coward classic is always an “audience pleaser” from its inception in the early forties, and this new production is like great champagne and caviar on the side. You don’t get more “sophisticated comedy” than this one, and it all holds up gorgeously.

Nobody does comedy quite like the brilliant Noël Coward! Main Street Theater (MST) is presenting Coward’s totally-irresistible and semi-autobiographical comedy, Present Laughter, this summer at its Rice Village location.

Nobody does comedy quite like the brilliant Noël Coward! Main Street Theater (MST) is presenting Coward's totally-irresistible and semi-autobiographical comedy, Present Laughter, this summer at its Rice Village location.

Dirt Dogs’ current incarnation of AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY is the finest work they have done in over eight years at the MATCH, and it is easily among the best things running this year in Houston theater. This show is cast immaculately, technical design nears flawless, and direction is tight and wrought. It is operatic, it is epic, and it is a must-see for fans of excellence in theatrical arts.

Main Street Theater's current production of Tom Stoppard's brilliant comedy, The Real Inspector Hound is a runaway hit!

Tom Stoppard’s THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND captures an urbane wittiness that is simultaneously droll and accessible. It’s a rare script that works on all levels with enough to analyze for the academic, and then slapstick humor to keep the childlike engaged fully. In short, it’s smart fun. It is the kind of piece that MAIN STREET THEATER handles particularly well.

The unconventional and oddball comedy from the Pulitzer Prize finalist, Madeleine George, sees the Greek god, Dionysus, reenter civilization disguised as a butch gardener, Diane. The god's mission to seduce mortal women and help end climate change creates a story that elicits guttural laughs and a great night of Houston theatre.

Rec Room Arts will present the Houston premiere of Hurricane Diane, Madeleine George's (Hulu's Only Murders in the Building) Obie Award-winning play that turns the Greek god Dionysus into Diane, a lesbian permaculture gardener whose secret mission is to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. Lily Wolff (Alley Theatre) will direct the production.

Rec Room Arts will begin the 2022 season with the Houston premiere of Dance Nation, Clare Barron's award-winning play about pre-teen competitive dancers and the burden of adolescence. Sophia Watt will direct the production, with choreography by Skye Bronfenbrenner. Preview performances begin January 20, with an official opening on Saturday, January 22. Performances will run through February 5.

For the second time in a year, the Short North Stage is bringing Mel Brooks' comedic musical YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN back to life. The musical opened Oct. 7 and will run through Nov. 7 at the Garden Theater (1187 North High Street in downtown Columbus).

Deemed one of the '25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World' by MovieMaker Magazine in 2019, the Third Horizon Film Festival returns for its fifth edition. This year the festival will be hosted hybrid style with a thoughtfully curated mix of in-person and virtual screenings beginning June 24, 2021, through July 1, 2021, in Miami, Florida.

Summer is often a popular time for theaters and festivals across the country to produce free Shakespeare for their cities. Obviously things are different this year, so Main Street Theater is bringing Shakespeare to people in their homes with two virtual offerings.

Rec Room Arts continues its fourth season with the Obie-Award winning play, Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and directed by Julia Oppenheim Traber. This riveting Houston premiere begins previews March 26, with an official press opening on Saturday, March 28, followed by an opening reception at Rec Room's Bar. Performances will run through April 18.

The year is 1967, the place is San Francisco, and the conflict? A young and optimistic mixed-race couple has just announced their upcoming plans of marriage to unsuspecting parents. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner extracts the nuances and subtleties of prejudice and plops them center stage, both literally and figuratively, in the living room of the liberal, upper-class Drayton family.

It wasn't the comedy of broadcasters who have absolutely no information to share but share it anyway that stayed with me, nor was it watching each of these characters disintegrate into their lowest common denominators as they desperately cling to order. It was instead in their attempts, on the last night of the world, to stay connected. They hold on to their microphones (quite literally) and to each other and their unseen audiences to their last coherent moment, 'speaking to keep loneliness at bay'.

Tamarie Cooper Directs The Catastrophic Theatre's Season Opener, TRAGEDY, A TRAGEDY 

The director has decided to look at the more giggle-worthy elements of PRIVATE LIVES, and has avoided some of the darker implications of this Noel Coward classic. Audiences should eat this one up like a buttered brioche with coffee the morning after a sordid affair.

Main Street Theater (MST) offers the perfect sparkling summer refreshment in the form of the wit and wisdom of Noel Coward's Private Lives. "It is by far my favorite of his plays," shares Coward specialist and the production's director Claire Hart-Palumbo. "In many ways Private Lives is an extraordinary play. The Twentieth Century equivalent of the Well-Made Play, it is elegance personified. The language is intelligent and delightfully witty. It's about the generation that was ravaged by World War I. He chose to write in a more familiar and recognizable style, with humor, wit, vivacity, and charm, but his characters express the same doubts and questioning with an elegance that is inevitably entertaining and astonishingly memorable." Along with Hart-Palumbo's insights, MST Executive Artistic Director Rebecca Greene Udden, who has a delicious cameo role in the show, offers, "It's just so brilliantly funny. I think we could all use a good laugh right now."