Second Thought Theatre artistic directors Kelsey Head and Steven Walters took their sweet time picking shows for the 2013 season at Bryant Hall. But maybe it was worth the wait. This small theater, along with Theatre Nouveau 47 and Fort Worth’s Trinity Shakespeare Festival, made season lineup announcements nearly simultaneously today…
In this week’s Dallas Observer, we chronicle the history of Jack Ruby, All-American Boy, perhaps the best play ever produced by Dallas Theater Center. It’s on a surprisingly short list of American plays that have dealt with the JFK assassination. Among the best: Macbird, a 1967 satire by Barbara Garson,…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. If you can still walk after stuffing your face full of turkey, mashed potatoes and whatever passes for cranberry dressing in your house, head on over to these shows to laugh off some…
Here’s how lack of attention to detail sucks the funny out of a big musical comedy like Crazy for You, the show packed with Gershwin songs and wedged uncomfortably into Theatre Three. In a scene in the second act, two female characters meet for the first time. They are rivals…
Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, in front of live TV cameras in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. He shot him again on April 23, 1974, before a live audience on the stage at the Kalita Humphreys Theater. The moment when the paunchy, oily-haired Dallas…
Did you know that the Mall of America in Minnesota is where the government Operation-Dumbo-Drops all of the obese people you’ve lost contact with? Jim Norton does. They’re totally fine, he said. No need to worry. I checked out Norton’s show at the Addison Improv over the weekend, and it…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Jim Norton at the Addison Improv Heard every weekday morning on the Opie & Anthony radio show and seen everywhere from bookshelves to Louie, Jim Norton is an angry force to be reckoned…
With his comedy special Please Be Offended out on Netflix, Jim Norton has taken to the road again with all new material. He called in from New York before leaving for his weekend of shows at the Addison Improv, and he actually sounded rested. He’d had a nap, apparently. See…
“Better 50 enemies outside the house than one within,” says an old Irish proverb. In the tiny, moldy Connemara cottage that’s the setting for Martin McDonagh’s tense 1996 drama The Beauty Queen of Leenane, both residents have one sworn enemy — each other. Now running at Kitchen Dog Theater in…
If Burying Our Father, the biblical whatchamacallit at Undermain Theatre, is supposed to be comedy, it needs to be funnier. If it’s supposed to be performance art, it needs more original moves. If it’s supposed to be a slightly too-long, goofy Sunday school pageant performed by a likable older couple,…
Something funny comes to the Winspear on Thursday with the one-night-only performance of the family-friendly one-man show MacHomer, actor-writer Rick Miller’s comic adaptation of Macbeth using characters from The Simpsons. It’s an inspired idea that Miller, a Toronto-based actor, launched in 1995 and has performed around the globe ever since…
“I’m calling her.” It was Saturday night at Hyena’s in Fort Worth, and Sean Kent, the comic, had commandeered the cell phone of a middle-aged woman who made the mistake of answering her daughter’s call during his show. After a string of text messages detailing Kat’s conception (one incarnation involved…
When news hit my Twitter feed yesterday that Louis C.K.’s next stand-up special — the one based on the act he blessed Dallas with last month — would premiere on HBO, my first reaction was: Oh, that download-forever thing didn’t work. Too bad. I liked paying $5 for some funny…
“I grew up in Austin, so Dallas was always the great, big, scary city,” Sean Kent says over the phone. I called him up to talk about his return to the big southern state, where he’ll do five nights of shows this weekend. “I love Hyena’s,” he says. “There’s just…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Sean Kent at Hyena’s in Fort Worth “I write a fuckload ’cause otherwise I get bored,” says Sean Kent. “I don’t wanna say the same stuff every year.” You hear that, guys? A…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Richard Lewis at the Addison Improv When Richard Lewis gets on stage, you really have no idea what you’re in for. He prepares nothing, writes nothing down. And it can be great. But…
Great idea by Lyric Stage producer Steven Jones to open his revival of the grand old musical 1776 during campaign season. If only more of those pesky “undecided voters” could see it. What they would witness first and foremost is another of Lyric’s spectacular productions of a rarely done piece…
What is the one thing you’d expect to see in a play about the world of professional televised wrestling? And what is missing from The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, which just opened in a passive-aggressive production by Dallas Theater Center at the Wyly Theatre? That would be wrestling. There…
“I’m in a really, really cool, weird zone.” Well no shit, Richard Lewis. I’m on the phone, talking, but mostly listening, to the veteran comedian, long-time stand-up and favorite on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. I can feel the self-loathing through the speaker, and if I’m not laughing, I’m nodding…
Editor’s note: We sent Jane the Intern to experience the Dallas Comedy House’s Level 1 Improv class. Here’s her report. The sweaty-faced young man to my left turns to me and yells, “Tell me seven things you love about driving!” “Aaaaaaah!” screams the entire group, scooping their voices and arms…
Every Wednesday night at the Graff Chevrolet Ultra Lounge in Grand Prairie, Vince Vance and his crew host a Komic Kontest, searching for the funniest of the funny in Texas. Comedians get on stage and compete to win $50 and the opening spot for the next week’s show. The Lounge,…
The limits of time, space and geography seem to fall away in Perro y Sangre (“dog and blood”), a thrilling blend of music, drama, flamenco and sex that opened for a four-night run at the 40-seat Ochre House theater last night. Written and directed by Ochre House founder Matthew Posey,…
