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.)
