Over her oven, Clare Floyd DeVries affixed a “Mrs. Lovett’s Pie Shop” sign. She’s a far cry from the cannibal baker in Sweeney Todd, it’s just a souvenir from one of the many sets she’s designed. “I do actually make meat pies,” she laughs. “Probably not the same kind though.”…
If you haven’t heard the news by now because you’ve been out of town, in a coma or some kind of bizarre parallel dimension that doesn’t have a good Wifi connection, Conan O’Brien is bringing his Conan show to town to tape a week’s worth of episodes at The Majestic…
The Dallas comedy scene has grown up so much so fast that among our evolving flock of chuckle monkeys, we now have “young comedians,” which in show business terms is somewhere in between the “neurula” and “tadpole” stages of comedy stardom…
All through The Fortress of Solitude, the huge new musical playing now at Dallas Theater Center (co-produced with New York’s Public Theater), we wait for that magical moment. Musicals need that moment. The good ones all have them. Eliza Doolittle’s “rain in Spain” linguistic breakthrough in My Fair Lady. The…
Late night talk show host Conan O’Brien is already in town running around and doing God-knows-what to our beloved city probably while wearing a ridiculous, oversized cowboy hat. That’s not a crack about his giant head. That’s just what we assume they hand out to out-of-towners as soon as they…
Spring has been flirting with us all winter, but it finally feels like it’s here to stay. OK, yesterday it might not have, but today it’s sunny. And let’s focus on today, shall we? Stepping outside into the sunny 75-degree weather is enough to put a spring in the step…
We’re trying not to go all TMZ here with updates about celebrities doing things that us normals do everyday like stopping for a burger, buying toilet paper in bulk and berating an intern for bringing us the wrong kind of coffee by giving them third-degree burns with it so they’ll…
Diana Sheehan is an award-winning actress and singer who relocated to Dallas five years ago and found herself following a successful New York career with a shining start in Texas, including winning “Best of the Loop” two years in a row at Watertower Theatre’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival,…
For a decade cabaret star Jim Caruso has been lighting up Mondays, traditionally Broadway’s performance-free “dark night,” with his late-night Cast Party. It’s a star-studded open mike at Manhattan’s Birdland nightclub, a time for stars to try out new material and unknowns to try to be discovered. Liza Minnelli likes…
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…
