A comedy album typically offers fans an opportunity to enjoy a stand-up set without interruption by hecklers or a table of yammering morons. Comics can cut out the moments that didn’t go as planned before the CD or MP3 goes to press, or have the hecklers removed during the recording,…
Putting together a comedy festival requires time, dedication and patience. Or if you’re comedian Dan Danzy, all you have to do is joke with one of your fans to make it happen, and watch them take it seriously. Danzy was performing at Andy’s Basement Bar and Grill on Denton’s North Locust…
Last week when Live Nation and Funny or Die announced the lineup for Oddball’s fourth tour, it was a disappointment to say the least. The next tour will kick off at the end of August and return to Dallas’ Gexa Energy Pavilion on Friday, September 23, with Dane Cook and…
In the past century, theater practitioners have engaged in a campaign to retranslate the Bard’s work from a traditional Elizabethan context into increasingly innovative settings: the Wild West, the Roaring Twenties, post nuclear holocaust, even the moon. This week, the high school artists in Junior Players’ The Taming of the Shrew…
Most comedians were inspired to pursue comedy as a career because they enjoyed the feeling of being the funny person in their family or friend group. Comedian Shawn Wayans didn’t have that luxury; he grew up in one of the biggest comedy families in American comedy history. “It’s actually easy…
Comedian and musician Craig Robinson probably doesn’t have to do stand-up comedy anymore. He’s been a recognizable name since his breakout role as warehouse foreman Darryl Philbin on NBC’s American remake of The Office. That led to memorable roles in hit movies such as Knocked Up, Pineapple Express and This is the End…
If you want to take improv, stand-up or sketch-writing classes in Dallas, Dallas Comedy House has become the go-to place. The business Amanda Austin opened in 2009 has blossomed into a community; people sign up for classes and routinely stick around to teach, perform and support their friends once they’ve…
Eighteen years in, the Festival of Independent Theatres, FIT for short, is still going strong. In a decade in which city support for the arts has been continuously shrinking (with no sign of change), the city’s 18-year history of support for FIT (also with no sign of change) is refreshing…
If you end up following a group called Sex Lab Inc. from the Texas Theatre this weekend, they will stop you and ask you to sign a liability waiver. Then, when they’ve shuttled you to an undisclosed second location, you might witness something unsavory. The name “Sex Lab Inc.” belongs…
In September 2014, acting troupe Shakespeare in the Bar got its start in Dallas on the back patio of The Wild Detectives bookstore in Oak Cliff. The actors’ shared mission? To make Shakespeare fun again, as it was intended to be, by drinking as they give barely rehearsed performances of…
A new experimental musical playing in Exposition Park this month takes its name from a hidden track on Nirvana’s Nevermind album. Arthur Peña, known for his work as a painter and as curator of the roving venue Vice Palace, wrote Endless/Nameless as an exploration of two types of death, the death of…
In the fourth grade I voted for George H.W. Bush in a mock election because I had a huge crush on the boy playing him. I didn’t watch the candidates on TV, read the paper or listen to talk radio. Like most kids, the extent of my relationship to politics…
Jane Lynch: You know her from Glee, Annie on Broadway and as the host of that game show featuring celebrities. But what about a cabaret show? Yes! Add that to the list of things Lynch does. And soon it will be your turn to see Jane sing in See Jane Sing,…
Stephen Tobolowsky’s strength as an actor is that he finds complexity in all of his characters; he doesn’t believe stories can always be reduced to a struggle between good and evil. Take, for instance, the Dallas native’s role as “Action” Jack Barker in the current, third season of Silicon Valley, the…
“It’s just messy right now,” a character in playwright Steve Yockey’s The Thrush and the Woodpecker states defensively early in the play. If only it were just messy right now. Steve Yockey is a Los Angeles-based writer whose play Blackberry Winter is currently receiving a National New Play Network (NNPN)…
If you’re planning to attend a production of Steve Yockey’s Blackberry Winter or The Thrush & the Woodpecker from Kitchen Dog Theater, plug in directions to Undermain Theatre. For more than a decade, Kitchen Dog Theater was housed in the bright blue building on McKinney Avenue known as The McKinney Avenue…
Comics are a cynical breed. Their goal is to make an audience laugh and one common way to do that is by pointing out holes in our beliefs and behavior. Ryan Singer uses a different technique to get guffaws from the crowd. He thinks a sense of humor is necessary to…
Eight figures wearing hooded terra cotta-colored robes could be made out through a thick fog on the stage as patrons trickled into a nearly sold-out Winspear Opera House Tuesday night for the kick-off event to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s second Soluna Festival. They were clearly the dancers who would be…
You don’t need to possess any knowledge of theater at all to know the character of Ophelia, Hamlet’s doomed lover; her tragic descent into madness, like some of Hamlet’s more dramatic speeches, has taken on a life of its own. But young Dallas playwright/actress Janielle Kastner would like you to…
There’s no doubt you’re watching a live radio drama when you watch The Intergalactic Nemesis. The actors bring their characters to life behind an old-timey microphone and a sound effects operator uses the whirl of a Little Tykes cement mixer to mimic the sound of a robot scuttling across a…
Trailer Park Boys, Canada’s classic television comedy series, has been running for 10 seasons and counting. Actor John Dunsworth brilliantly plays the Boys’ drunken nemesis, Jim Lahey. Along with his shirtless sidekick and on-and-off lover, Randy, Lahey has sent the Boys to jail several times. A former police officer and…
Back in 2009, just as the Dallas Theater Center was moving into its brand new home in the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Wyly Theatre, DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty sat in the audience for a performance of Cara Mia Theatre Co.’s original production of Crystal City 1969. Although it was his…
