ENDING WITH A BANG: The Undermain Theatre is wrapping up its current season with another of its unconventional shows. The Shipment is less of a play and more of a variety show, using stand-up comedy, a song-and-dance number and other methods to look at race and cultural identity. And it seems to be working. Lawson Taitte says the show, “throws up mirrors in the psyche that will have you retracing your steps through the funhouse maze for a good long while,” in his dallasnews.com review. “Undermain has produced, yet again, a work as difficult to define as the ideas it dredges,” David Novinski writes on theaterjones.com. “The evening is unsettling as much for its content as for its enjoyability.” And M. Lance Lusk calls the show, “intense, thought-provoking, and often hilarious,” on Front Row. Catch it through June 25.

FLYING HIGH: In WaterTower Theatre’s Shooting Star, a man (James Crawford) and woman (Diana Sheehan) who dated in college 25 years ago unexpectedly find themselves snowed in at an airport. They get to talking, and old flames are rekindled. “It wouldn’t work so well without actors who can sell the connection—not just the one now, but the one they used to have,” Mark Lowry writes on theaterjones.com. “Crawford and Sheehan commit to that idea with a big payoff.” Lawson Taitte was so-so on the script but happy with the performances on dallasnews.com. “Crawford is especially vivid in a momentary outburst of anger, and he shows us Reed’s foibles without turning him into a caricature. Sheehan hooks us emotionally every time she digs into Elena’s checkered past.” Catch it through June 26.

THE DSO IN NYC: In the current issue of The New Yorker, Alex Ross reviewed the recent Spring for Music festival at Carnegie Hall. And he was impressed with what he heard out of the DSO. ” The Dallas Symphony devoted its concert to a single work: Steven Stucky’s August 4, 1964, a seventy-minute-long oratorio written in ambivalent memory of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Jaap van Zweden, Dallas’s gifted director, led with diagrammatic precision.”