Onstage NTX Writers’ 2025 ‘Bests & Faves’ (Martha)
—Martha Heimberg
My shout-outs to 2025 brilliant live theater-makings, chosen from among the 30 shows I saw—and in no particular order:
1. Vonda K. Bowling’s orchestrations in Dallas Theater Center’s Waitress and the hilarious, touching and (in the same show) the romantic vibes between Tiffany Solano’s tough, poignant waitress and Blake Hackler’s manic tax auditor in love. Hackler easily upstages kids, dogs and marching bands when he steps into the spotlight, where I’m guessing he breathes deepest.
2. The not-quite catfight between posture-perfect, thrust-chin Catherine DuBord and JuNene K (an iceberg heated by a geyser about to erupt), both claiming ownership of their mutual husband, Bryan Pitts’ hapless Henry “Box” Brown in Undermain’s Box, a bizarre and fascinating play by Jarret King with a killer cast, including leering Steven Young as a deliciously cruel plantation master. And it’s reasonably true, to boot—the enslaved Brown did mail himself to freedom.
3. Tiffany Nichole Greene’s direction of 30 zingy actors, plus Ahmad Simms’ slam-bang-and-land-it choreography in the Dallas Theater Center’s opulent anniversary production of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 50-year-old Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It had kids stomping and clapping along—and Leah Mazur’s exquisite set design, with Islam-inspired carvings in the scrims.
4. Gigi Cervantes as a desperate woman whose immune system is shot to hell, still searching for a cure in Blake Hackler’s harrowing Healed at Second Thought Theatre. Funny aha-ha-ha Karen Parrish is a literally laid-back patient who’s perfected falling, and vicki washington a mystical or insane savant—and both own their moments outright.
5. Maybe its just the times, but I felt a kind of warped kinship with Marianne Galloway’s lost-in-the-funhouse divorcee and clueless detective in BrianDang’s h*llo k*tty syndrome at Undermain. Also she can sign and chew gum at the same time. Everybody rocks it in this show. Yeehaw for Ryan Michael Friedman’s lanky gay cowpoke and Parker Gray’s demon clown with a ruthless need to make people break up. Get it? Like, how can you not love live theater?
6. Matthew Posey’s beastly Baron, a blotted old fart with a mean streak and a lot of power, is almost too close to the gold house occupant for comfort in Moving Creatures, which he wrote and directed and other stuff at Ochre House Theater, a place where I never know what will happen until I get home. I’d also like to ask Michael Stimac’s quack doctor to set up an office in Lakewood. I’d throw in that $15 copay for a giggle or a snicker.
