Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. All Star Comedy Jam at Verizon Theatre Since this jam has been going strong for four years now, we assume that Shaq is now officially better at putting together comedy shows than making…
Kitchen Dog Theater’s production of Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs is perfectly absurd. Also absurdly perfect. Change hats. It takes a few minutes, 15 or 20, to get into the rhythm of the thing. At first it’s slow, but for good reasons. The pace gradually picks up, like the assembly line…
In Death by Microphone, local Brit and barbecue blogger Gavin Cleaver attends stand-up comedy classes at the Dallas Comedy House and reports back for our amusement and education. Check back next week to revel further in his failure. There are lots of styles of stand-up comedy, from the surreal to…
Inside Comedy, Showtime’s series of interviews with big-name comics, returns Monday with the premiere of its second season. It’s an impressive roster of funny people: Will Ferrell, Betty White, Bill Maher, Steve Martin, Tina Fey and others. Their opening punch is their strongest, though: Louis CK, who explains in the…
In Death by Microphone, local Brit and barbecue blogger Gavin Cleaver attends stand-up comedy classes at the Dallas Comedy House and reports back for our amusement and education. Check back next week to revel further in his failure. After the success last week of appealing to the lowest common denominator…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Chris Porter at Hyena’s in Dallas Spreading his drunk and stoned Midwest musings around the country is what Chris Porter does best. This Kansas City native has been making his way around the…
Good actors are doing their level best with a not-so-good play and a sub-standard production at African American Repertory Theatre in DeSoto. The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years — whew — is a dull period comedy that deals…
Sometimes it’s worth it to wait and catch a show at the end of its run rather than on opening night. By the third or fourth week, actors have it down. No stumbling over dialogue. No loss of focus. So it is with the ferociously good production at Theatre Three…
The first Friday of every month brings Viva Dallas burlesque to the Lakewood Theater, and this past Friday included an extra helping of sauce: a Mardi Gras theme. Hosted by Violet O’Hara, the show included performances by Iris Le Mour, Ruby Joule, Jolie Goodnight, Honey Cocoa Bordeaux and Pearl Lux,…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Greg Fitzsimmons at Addison Improv A regular guest of David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jay Leno, Fitzsimmons’s set is infused with his acerbic wit and scathing sarcasm. For example, did you…
In Death by Microphone, local Brit and barbecue blogger Gavin Cleaver attends stand-up comedy classes at the Dallas Comedy House and reports back for our amusement and education. Check back next week to revel further in his failure. After last week’s disaster, morale was low on the Good Ship Cleaver…
Actor Brian McEleney is the luckiest person in the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre during Dallas Theater Center’s production of King Lear. He’s the only one in the hall who doesn’t have to watch his performance in the title role. For this co-production with Rhode Island’s Trinity Repertory Company, DTC…
Dallas actor and playwright Danny O’Connor first performed his one-man show Zero at WaterTower Theatre’s black box studio five and a half years ago. Since then, he’s lost 60 pounds and he and his show have gained some comedy muscle. Now he’s a taller, younger, leaner version of Louis C.K…
“I know there are comedians that think you need to know how to deal with it, but I don’t want to be good at it,” Kyle Kinane said of hecklers in his Mixmaster interview last week. On Sunday, his last night at the Addison Improv, he proved that whether he…
“Look, no one’s going to actually support TMZ, but what ever happened to shame?” This is a big question Kyle Kinane’s posing, one I’m not fully ready to unpack at 3 p.m. The comedian and actor is very vocal on Twitter, the modern stage for comedians, and on Tuesday, he…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Ahmed Ahmed’s Next Generation Comedy Tour at the Majestic Theater Ahmed Ahmed (Yep, that’s his name, not a type-o.), star of the TBS hit comedy Sullivan & Son, returns to stages across the…
Do I hear a waltz? And a Charleston? And some numbers from Ghost: The Musical? The theater year gets off to an upbeat start with talented actors singing their faces off in a trio of musicals, large and small, stretching from Fair Park to Turtle Creek to Addison. The biggie…
Matthew Posey writes, directs and stars in all of the weird, wonderful musical dramedies he puts on at his Ochre House theater, and he always shows the audience something unexpected. He plays the banjo in Old: a Vaudeville Tragedy in Two Acts, currently running at the tiny space near Fair…
Putting It Together, a two-hour revue of Stephen Sondheim songs, isn’t much of a musical. It’s more of a meh-sical. But WaterTower Theatre in Addison has a reasonably pleasant staging of it directed by Terry Martin. Singer-actors Alex Organ, Bob Hess, John Campione, Diana Sheehan and newcomer Sarah Elizabeth Smith…
In Death by Microphone, local Brit and barbecue blogger Gavin Cleaver attends stand-up comedy classes at the Dallas Comedy House and reports back for our amusement. Check back next week to revel further in his failure. It felt like a lengthy course last week, two hours during which we heard…
Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is like the Beethoven’s Fifth of 20th-century classical music. It’s such an iconic work that even if you don’t know it, you probably know it. In 1940, Walt Disney’s animators, inspired by the primitive undertones of Stravinsky’s aggressive, pulsating music, set to the score visions…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Pablo Francisco at the Addison Improv Feel like seeing a few shows this weekend, but only have time for one? Come check out Pablo Francisco as he flashes through myriad characters while doing…
