See if this plot sounds familiar: Cranky old Jewish comic whose career is kaput is asked to appear for big bucks on a TV special honoring comedy legends. He balks. He picks fights with his writing partner. They argue, make jokes and make amends, and finally do the act. The…
The spring theater season begins with WaterTower Theatre’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, which isn’t a “fringe festival” at all but a juried collection of plays, solo performances, dance and music on three stages. This year’s event, running through March 23 (and co-sponsored by the Dallas Observer), features 19…
The last thing a writer feels like doing on a day when it seems that everything is just out of his reach is bask in the glory of another writer who actually made it. Sometimes the days can consist of getting your ego beaten as if it owed someone money…
The people in charge of the fifth annual Dallas Comedy Festival are doing things a bit differently this year. “We really wanted to be diverse with our headliners this year,” says festival Co-Executive Producer, Sarah Adams. “Booking Rory (Scovel) to open the festival is a new concept for us. We…
Out of the Loop Fringe Festival is an annual event at Watertower Theater featuring a packed schedule of mostly local acts through Sunday. Cody Lucas returns to his hometown for the fest, with Sweet Chariot, a show about a man in a bathtub. There are two more chances to see…
Saturday evening, I participated in the activity known in New York City or Los Angeles as “gallery hopping,” which is exactly what it sounds like. I just often forget you can do it in Dallas. On nights packed with openings, it can be the perfect pre-dinner or concert activity. Swing…
Cross the forlorn siblings in Chekhov’s Three Sisters with the squabbling kin in Arrested Development and you get a good idea what the family is like in Christopher Durang’s Tony-winning comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. It’s a brilliant, funny play getting a brilliant production at Uptown Players,…
Stand-up and improvisational comedians seem like they should be mortal enemies — two opposing camps with incompatible views on how to make audiences laugh. They’re the Hatfields and McCoys of funny, with punch-line flingers on one side and scene-building tacticians on the other battling for your admiration and attention, both…
Nobody likes dance shows. It’s an arts statistic we don’t like to talk about. People will wander through free museum exhibits; they’ll show up with their bottles of wine for Shakespeare in Park; they’ll even sell out operas like Carmen and Turandot. But nobody sits through dance anymore, except reluctant…
Some characters in plays are people you’d like to know in real life. In The Motherfucker with the Hat, the five characters, with maybe one exception, you are happy to walk away from after 95 minutes. That’s how long Stephen Adly Guirgis’ profanity-spewing dark comedy lasts and that’s more than…
Dallas, meet Performance Southwest. Even if you’re not a performance art fan the name might sound familiar from fits and starts around town, but their mission is much larger than this city. It’s an educational group with constituents all over the country dedicated to educating audiences on the exciting, yet…
It’s hard to overestimate the impact Philip Glass has had on classical music. Apart from being (arguably) the world’s greatest living composer, Glass almost single handedly brought minimalism into contemporary popular culture — influencing legions of rock and electronic artists while simultaneously introducing classical music to a generation of otherwise…
My phone rings. It supposed to be Chelsea Handler calling from her office in L.A. to talk about her upcoming show in Dallas (March 28 at the Verizon Theatre). It isn’t. It’s her handler, Elizabeth, yelling over ear-piercing beeps in the background. They’re having “some sort of fire drill or…
More than a week after announcing that Rory Scovel would headline their annual Dallas Comedy Festival, the Dallas Comedy House announced that another big name in standup will take to their black painted stage. The Deep Ellum comedy club confirmed that Chelsea Peretti will perform two shows on their stage…
The basic question for Blue Roses is: Why? With a play as perfect as The Glass Menagerie, why mess with it at all? Why did anyone think turning it into a musical would work? Worse yet, why turn it into a bad musical, which is what’s playing at Irving’s Lyric…
Having a crummy childhood is a perfect training ground for comedy. Few things can suck the innocence out of a kid faster than being the only person sitting at a table covered in colorful Visqueen, helium filled balloons and a beautiful birthday cake that were all bought just for them…
If you are one of the masses that didn’t make it the Winspear Opera House the last time Book of Mormon came to town (that makes two of us), this little blog post is about to make your day. The hit show coming back to Dallas, as part of the…
On Wednesday night my phone blinked on the nightstand. It was a text from a friend who had just seen The Dallas Opera’s opening night production of Tod Machover’s much buzzed about sci-fi opera, Death and the Powers. “Robot opera. I dunno,” she typed. “The technology is a little …
A lot of people are going to be in town between March and April thanks to the NCAA Division 1 Men’s Final Four Championship at Cowboys Stadium. One of those people will be Conan O’Brien. The late night host of TBS’ Conan and his sidekick Andy Richter will tape a…
The Dallas Comedy House has a fairly tall bar to jump over after past years’ comedy festivals, but it’s off to a good start with its main stand-up show. The club confirmed that national headliner and star of TBS’ Ground Floor Rory Scovel will headline the stand-up portion of the…
Its title is the only bit of shock in Cock, the play by British writer Mike Bartlett now running as Second Thought Theatre’s 10th season opener at Bryant Hall. Oh, it’s all about the peen, where it goes and who wants it, but as a piece of contemporary drama, Cock…
Comedian Pablo Francisco is somewhere in Virginia Beach, en route to another round of publicity interviews, and his cell phone is stuck under his seat. He and his driver can hear it ringing but decide to retrieve it after they arrive at their destination. Except that plan won’t work. He’s…
