In hindsight, I suppose I understand why Tracy Morgan would be pissed off by a question about audiences and bloggers complaining that his recent set is too raunchy. An entire set being characterized by one segment — even if it is the opening bit — would grate on anyone who…
You know him. You love him. You wanna get stoned and eat popcorn with him. Comedian Doug Benson is on tour, and he’s recording an episode of his podcast Doug Loves Movies at Hyena’s during a special 4:20 p.m. show on Saturday, June 15. Benson believes in comedic collaboration, so…
Every week we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Aziz Ansari at the Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie Aziz Ansari is taking his Buried Alive! tour across America, targeting any cities he had to skip last time. Loved for his role as…
Dull jobs in dreary surroundings have inspired many a wonderful play: David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, set in a rundown sales office; Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan’s Mister Roberts, about bored sailors on a WWII supply ship; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the granddaddy of all dramas about soul-sucking…
If you’re a fan of Glengarry Glen Ross and you missed the fantastically funny Daffodil Girls at Plano’s Fun House Theatre and Film last month, it’s back for a weekend reprise, June 5 through 8 in the Plano Children’s Theatre space. Written and directed by Fun House founder and kiddie…
Kitchen Dog Theater opens its 15th annual New Works Festival with Octavio Solis’ absurd one-act Se Llama Cristina. It begins as a fuzzy encounter between a couple, played by Dallas stage newcomers Vanessa DeSilvio and Israel Lopez, wacked out on heroin and waking up a little hazy about who they…
Kitchen Dog Theater’s New Works Festival started Friday at The MAC and runs through June 22. Here’s the lineup: Se Llama Cristina by Octavio Solis is the mainstage feature of this annual festival of new plays and script readings. A couple (Israel Lopez, Vanessa DeSilvio) wake up after a heroin…
Every week we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Jon Reep at Hyena’s in Fort Worth North Carolina native Jon Reep has been on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, Comedy Central’s Premium Blend and the half-hour special Comedy Central Presents: Jon Reep. On…
High camp: Mae West in a feather boa in She Done Him Wrong. Low camp: Jamie Farr in a dowdy dress on M*A*S*H. Camp adjacent: Every cock in a frock in the mock campy Priscilla Queen of the Desert the Musical, whose national tour is now at the Dallas Summer…
It’s chicken enchilada night at Ryan Stiles’ house, and he’s manning the stove. Stiles does all the cooking for his family. He is, after all, semi-retired. But he’ll be back on the road again this summer with Whose Live Anyway?, the 90-minute, live version of Whose Line is it Anyway?,…
Every week we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Amy Schumer at the House of Blues Schumer is the creator, star and writer of Inside Amy Schumer, her Comedy Central TV show that premiered last month. You’ve seen her roast some of…
Count on Dallas Children’s Theater to do more than just mail it in with The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley, based on the popular kids’ book by Jeff Brown. The musical adaptation, directed and choreographed by Michael Serrecchia (with an assist from Megan Kelly Bates), makes a slick, three-dimensional, 75-minute…
Whole lotta twerking going on in Fela!, the Broadway musical whose national tour is now steaming up the Winspear Opera House. The dancing in this show is hotness on a whole other scale from other Broadway hits. Bill T. Jones’ nonstop choreography fills Fela! with an athletic eroticism centered roundly…
Every week we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Marc Ryan at Hyena’s in Dallas From the backwoods of Louisiana, Marc Ryan is a hootin’ and hollerin’ ball of energy on stage. Constantly battling the “stupid hick” stereotype, Ryan is anything but…
The Fates may finally have sprinkled stardust on Dallas Theater Center’s artistic director, Kevin Moriarty. For years he’s been trying to launch a new musical here, with the hope of turning it into a Broadway success. Giant didn’t do it. Neither did Lysistrata Jones. But his latest attempt, the dreamy…
Why does it always feel like a fluke when Theatre Three does something as polished and well-acted as Enron? The play by Lucy Prebble is running now at the theater-in-the-round at The Quadrangle in a spiffy production directed and designed by Jeffrey Schmidt. Like last year’s staging of Aaron Sorkin’s…
Every week we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Eddie Griffin at the Addison Improv Eddie Griffin thinks white churches are scary, especially Catholic ones. Priests float out in white robes with crosses around their necks and the choir sounds like something…
If only college life were ever as naive and boisterous as it was in the 1939 musical Too Many Girls, now getting a sis-boom-beautiful revival at Irving’s Lyric Stage. Out at New Mexico’s fictional Pottawotamie U, the football team has started winning, thanks to four Ivy League transfers who know…
New Mexico is where you’ll find the six characters in search of an exit line in Angels Fall, a dreary play Lanford Wilson was always sorry he’d written. (It was a commission project he churned out and hated, or so he said in The New York Times.) Contemporary Theatre of…
Last August, Tig Notaro got on stage at the L.A. comedy club Largo and addressed the crowd. “Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you?” Notaro had just been diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer, and knew she couldn’t do her typical set, which often illuminates the absurd in…
Ah, now we know what was missing from all of Uptown Players’ previous men-in-drag comedies by Las Vegas playwright Jamie Morris: Jamie Morris wasn’t in them. He’s in his latest — Re-Designing Women, now in its world premiere at the Rose Room on Cedar Springs — and he’s terrific. In…
We don’t know if it’s got something to do with the lack of promotion of Sons of Hermann Hall events, the public being distracted by all the twists and turns in the rebuilding Big Tex saga, or the overwhelming indifference of an uncaring world, but somewhat excellent stand-up and all-round…
