This Friday Whitney Cummings takes the stage at House of Blues on her first tour since launching two sitcoms back in 2011. Though the eponymous Whitney has been cancelled, 2 Broke Girls is still trucking, and Cummings talked to us about being back on the road and the inexplicable flak…
Dylan Moran, the star of the British sitcom Black Books and actor in movies such as Shaun of the Dead, Notting Hill and Run, Fatboy, Run — and who is now writing a pilot for ABC — spoke to Mixmaster about what topics he plans to tackle when he takes…
Plasmatically speaking, let’s give the new musical Fire and Blood, making its debut at Richland College, a B-negative. It’s a big, ambitious mess of a show, with book and lyrics by Richland drama prof Andy Long (who also directed) and music by Dallas composer and musical director Adam C. Wright…
The material has promise, but the production of TeCo Theatrical’s latest at the Bishop Arts Theatre, Black at the Assassination, doesn’t do it any justice. And justice is what this new play by Dallas writers Kyadal Robertson and Camika Spencer is all about. Connected by one event, the assassination of…
This year marks the 75th anniversary of actor, director and noted healthy eater Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. It famously led anxious Americans to believe that aliens were landing and sparked a height of panic and rioting that wouldn’t be seen again until Detroit’s last World…
Depending on your sense of humor and/or level of empathy, you might be amused to learn that a lot of the life and times of the tragic comic figure Karl Welzein, star of the @DadBoner Twitter feed and subject of the humorous journal novel Power Moves, comes from the real…
Sandra Bernhard is an actress, comedian, writer, singer, advocate and in general just kind of a badass bitch. And she knows it. Bernhard’s latest show, The Comedic Prophesies of Sandra Bernhard, is playing at The Kessler at 8 tonight. Tickets range from $25 to $300 and are on sale at…
Comedians don’t like our Texas heat. It melts their humor, and that’s a puddle nobody wants to step in. Now that our city’s cooled off, we’re getting those big names back in heavy rotation. This week’s talent pool is exceptionally strong, so if you like great comedy (nod), here’s six…
When you interview comedian Kathleen Madigan, whose upcoming show at the Majestic happens Friday, there’s no cutting corners. Before making it big, she worked in print journalism for Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis. A passion for journalism was lacking, but she could “write a sentence,” so it was something…
Put some masterminds together and you’re bound to ignite sparks of creative genius. Ochre House’s Matthew Posey and flamenco artist Delilah Muse both have been awardees in the Observer’s annual Masterminds round-up. Dancer Danielle Georgiou was a runner-up this year. You can experience the trio’s latest artistic collaboration this week…
If you drive up U.S. 75 long enough, you enter the most recently developed reaches of Collin County, home of the almost-arena, the Allen Event Center. Because it can seat more than 8,000, it’s usually used for indoor football, soccer and hockey. But on Saturday night ex-Saturday Night Live stars…
Long regarded as a commentary on the nuclear panic of the Cold War, Samuel Beckett’s 1961 absurdist comedy Happy Days now seems more like a cartoon of a long, rotten marriage. Wingspan Theatre Company is doing the play right now at the Bath House. Director Susan Sargeant amps up the…
Clybourne Park is the second great major American drama about the hell of dealing with a homeowners’ association. The first was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Clybourne’s source material from half a century ago. Both shows are running at Dallas Theater Center (at the Wyly Theatre), sharing cast…
Outside of Dallas, too many people think there’s no great theater happening inside of Dallas. We know better. Besides the giant venues with the name of a telecommunications giant attached to them, there are a bunch of more interesting, smaller playhouses where local actors, directors and playwrights are putting new…
Magician/comedian The Amazing Johnathan comes from the magical land Las Vegas, where families’ college funds mysteriously disappear, and those with $10 in their pocket can consume more barbeque ribs than science allows. He got his start performing for spare change on street corners. Later, he joined the comedy clubs ranks…
Local fans of mainstream comedy headliners have the rare opportunity of having a choice of comedians to see this Friday, unless they have figured out some biological chemical algorithm to achieve transubstantiation, in which case HOLLER. Mr. Show and Sarah Silverman Program star Brian Posehn will be at Hyena’s Comedy…
The greasy haired, cocktail clutching comedian Neil Hamburger often gets compared to Tony Clifton, the egotistical lounge singer who served as the alter ego of the late Andy Kaufman. But that’s unfair: Hamburger’s a much crueler bastard. The self-proclaimed “King of Komedy” has an ingenious hook that most comedy club…
If you’re in Deep Ellum on Thursday, October 24, and you see a hammered dude stumbling across the street with a barstool and mic, you should know in advance that it’s not Zombie Carlin, as welcome a sight as that would be. It’s the Dallas Observer’s first-ever Comedy Crawl. We…
It does feel weird to applaud after John Wilkes Booth sings about shooting President Lincoln in the opening scene of Assassins, the 1990 Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical now playing at Theatre Three. But damn, actor Gregory Lush is so matinee-idol handsome as Booth, and his performance of “The Ballad of…
October may be the traditional time to watch scary movies, but there aren’t many new scary things coming to a theater near you this month, unless you count Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Escape Plan. The Dallas Comedy House has a worthy-sounding alternative to pretending that you wet your pants…
The tale of the retired wrestler is often a tragic one, as Grantland contributor David Shoemaker has made a career of cataloging. In a way the post-ring career of former multi-WWE champion Mick Foley serves as sort of a fairytale-type alternative scenario for those hoping to leave the business unscathed…
There’s hardly anything more enjoyable in live theater in this town than watching Kitchen Dog’s leading lady Tina Parker perform an onstage emotional meltdown. In her latest role, co-starring in Lisa D’Amour’s dark comedy Detroit, Parker is in maximum meltdown mode playing Mary, a nervous paralegal married to gangly laid-off…
