“There’s something awfully sad about happiness, isn’t there?” says the leading man in Noel Coward’s bubbly 1939 comedy Present Laughter. Oh, truer words, dahling, truer words. Happy to report then that it’s all smiles in Theatre Three’s smartly acted dollop of Coward froth. There are things that will make you…
See also: The Rise of the Understudies Over the next five years, the AT&T Performing Arts Center and Shakespeare Dallas will present all of William Shakespeare’s work, including every one of the plays and sonnets. If he wrote any mash notes or shopping lists, they’ll do those, too. The Complete…
Someday musical theater will unplug the jukebox and come up with new tunes. Just not anytime soon. Not as long as audiences are still paying to see shows patched together from the hits of yesteryear. Mamma Mia! does ABBA. Rock of Ages is wrapped around songs of 1980s “hair bands”…
It was a good weekend on Broadway for the Booker T. High School Class of ’92. Actors Brian J. Gonzales and Cedric Neal, who graduated the same year from Dallas’ performing arts magnet school, both stepped into leading roles in big New York shows on a moment’s notice. Gonzales, understudy…
The House of Blues over the weekend hosted the LOL! comedy showcase, which brought together four local comics for one home-grown show. Here’s what you missed, from Obed the Intern: – Aaron Aryanpur opened with homey quips about his 7-year-old son and Whataburger. Aryanpur joked with the audience about how…
Find more theater at dallasobserver.com/calendar. In good farce, there shouldn’t be time to breathe. Farce moves. Its momentum picks up speed. When you’re watching well-done farce, you should be laughing so hard at the sheer pace of the comedy you get mad at yourself for missing some of the dialogue…
Women who talk to God, to a coyote, to a therapist and to the world at large speak their minds in four plays, three of them world premieres, that hit the stage over the second weekend of the month-long Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center. There…
While every major touring comic pops into Dallas, our local comedy scene is often overlooked. We’ve got the talent, it’s just scattered all over the metroplex. House of Blues is going to make it easy on you and showcase the best comedy acts in the area on Saturday at LOL!…
See also: Second Thought’s Bomb-itty of Errors Playwright Charles Busch always plays the leading lady in his en travisti comedies on a New York stage. But Dallas actor Coy Covington is so close to Busch’s league of broadly comic cross-dressing broads that the playwright takes tips from him on how…
There used to be a family joke in the Morpurgo farmhouse in Devon, England. Whenever the phone would ring at odd hours or during a meal, dad Michael, author of more than 100 children’s books, or his wife Clare or one of their kids would say, “Answer it. It might…
Dromio and Antipholus of Ephesus have long-lost identical twin brothers named Dromio and Antipholus (they live in Syracuse). The two sets of servants and masters collide in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Second Thought Theatre ends its eighth season this weekend with the final performances of its spoof of the…
Shout hallelujah! Come on, get happy! Coy Covington is back in a Charles Busch comedy at Uptown Players at the Kalita Humphreys Theater. The Divine Sister presents the divine Mr. Covington, Dallas’ finest interpreter of Busch’s en travisti roles, decked out in full penguin garb as the preternaturally sunny Mother…
The puppets have found their people. Theatre Too’s local debut of the musical Avenue Q is such a hit, the run has been extended an additional six weeks. Since it opened earlier this month, every performance of the show has been sold out. Looks like audiences love laughing along with…
Find more theater events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. The monthlong Festival of Independent Theatres, redundantly nicknamed FITfest, opens at the Bath House Cultural Center this weekend. Eight plays, each shorter than an hour, are performed in rotating repertory, Thursdays through Saturdays, over the next four weekends (July 13-August 4). It’s the fourteenth…
What do you do with a B.A. in English? Learn to make lattes? Live with your folks? Or buckle down and create something fresh, funny and smart like Avenue Q? If you have it in you, do it. If you’re still in college and think you might have it in…
Rolling off of last year’s success, the Uptown Players announced that, following popular demand, a previously unplanned Dallas Pride Performance Arts Festival has just been scheduled for September 9-15, coinciding with the 29th Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade on September 16. (Applications for which can be found here, with an…
No doubt about it, getting gorgeous actors into Bible-based musicals and Shakespearean tragedies definitely ratchets up the “let’s go see it” factor. Right now Dallas/Fort Worth stages have a bumper summer crop of beauts, male and female, trodding the boards. It’s hard to winnow the list to a mere 10,…
Quick, while temps have dipped slightly below heatstroke levels, make plans to catch Shakespeare Dallas’ Twelfth Night at Samuell-Grand Amphitheater. You can take a picnic or sack of snacks with you. Flop onto your blanket or low lawn chair and soak up some culture as the sun sets over cottonwood…
Playwright and SMU grad Beth Henley won a Pulitzer for her 1981 Southern gothic comedy Crimes of the Heart. Interesting to note that the 1981 Pulitzer for fiction went to John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. It was a good year for literature about idiots in Dixie. Crimes, now…
Among things you can see in Dallas Theater Center’s production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Wyly Theatre: Old Testament characters playing basketball and plugged into iPods; a giant wooden pyramid that breaks apart like a cool toy from a museum…
The folks from Old Murder House Theatre warned me last week that the only way to make it through their live reenactment of Jurassic Park was to hold onto my butt. And held on I did. From the moment the first park worker was devoured by an imaginary Velociraptor to…
Leave it to director René Moreno (profiled in this week’s “People” issue) to find a way to make Coriolanus hot. For Shakespeare Dallas’ first production of this rarely done bit of Bard, Moreno cast the easy-on-the-eyes (and ears) actor Alex Organ in the title role. He plays Shakespeare’s lonely warrior,…
