Actor Brian McEleney is the luckiest person in the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre during Dallas Theater Center’s production of King Lear. He’s the only one in the hall who doesn’t have to watch his performance in the title role. For this co-production with Rhode Island’s Trinity Repertory Company, DTC…
Dallas actor and playwright Danny O’Connor first performed his one-man show Zero at WaterTower Theatre’s black box studio five and a half years ago. Since then, he’s lost 60 pounds and he and his show have gained some comedy muscle. Now he’s a taller, younger, leaner version of Louis C.K…
“I know there are comedians that think you need to know how to deal with it, but I don’t want to be good at it,” Kyle Kinane said of hecklers in his Mixmaster interview last week. On Sunday, his last night at the Addison Improv, he proved that whether he…
“Look, no one’s going to actually support TMZ, but what ever happened to shame?” This is a big question Kyle Kinane’s posing, one I’m not fully ready to unpack at 3 p.m. The comedian and actor is very vocal on Twitter, the modern stage for comedians, and on Tuesday, he…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Ahmed Ahmed’s Next Generation Comedy Tour at the Majestic Theater Ahmed Ahmed (Yep, that’s his name, not a type-o.), star of the TBS hit comedy Sullivan & Son, returns to stages across the…
Do I hear a waltz? And a Charleston? And some numbers from Ghost: The Musical? The theater year gets off to an upbeat start with talented actors singing their faces off in a trio of musicals, large and small, stretching from Fair Park to Turtle Creek to Addison. The biggie…
Matthew Posey writes, directs and stars in all of the weird, wonderful musical dramedies he puts on at his Ochre House theater, and he always shows the audience something unexpected. He plays the banjo in Old: a Vaudeville Tragedy in Two Acts, currently running at the tiny space near Fair…
Putting It Together, a two-hour revue of Stephen Sondheim songs, isn’t much of a musical. It’s more of a meh-sical. But WaterTower Theatre in Addison has a reasonably pleasant staging of it directed by Terry Martin. Singer-actors Alex Organ, Bob Hess, John Campione, Diana Sheehan and newcomer Sarah Elizabeth Smith…
In Death by Microphone, local Brit and barbecue blogger Gavin Cleaver attends stand-up comedy classes at the Dallas Comedy House and reports back for our amusement. Check back next week to revel further in his failure. It felt like a lengthy course last week, two hours during which we heard…
Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is like the Beethoven’s Fifth of 20th-century classical music. It’s such an iconic work that even if you don’t know it, you probably know it. In 1940, Walt Disney’s animators, inspired by the primitive undertones of Stravinsky’s aggressive, pulsating music, set to the score visions…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Pablo Francisco at the Addison Improv Feel like seeing a few shows this weekend, but only have time for one? Come check out Pablo Francisco as he flashes through myriad characters while doing…
Couple things. Christopher Walken’s got nothing on Van Quattro. More about that in a sec. If you have avoided live theater lately because you think it’s boring and the plays are too long, Second Thought Theatre’s season-opening production of Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane will change your mind. Get…
In Death by Microphone, local Brit and barbecue blogger Gavin Cleaver attends stand-up comedy classes at the Dallas Comedy House and reports back for our amusement. Check back next week to see how his first bit goes. So then. Learning to be amusing. I am nervous. Especially at the Dallas…
I was a bit concerned that Saturday’s Mike Birbiglia performance, My Boyfriend’s Girlfriend, at the Winspear Opera House wasn’t billed as stand-up but rather as a solo show or monologue. Most stand-up acts could be described as a monologue or a solo show. What’s the difference between a stand-up performance…
Big comedy news o’clock, everyone, as tickets for Bill Burr’s stand-up show at the Majestic go on sale today. If you don’t think this will sell out faster than a pop star faced with a check from Pepsi, you’re going to be disappointed next week. A fixture across all kinds…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. D.L. Hughley at the Addison Improv The star of The Hughleys and one of the four comedians featured in the Spike Lee film The Original Kings of Comedy, D.L. Hughley is a household…
“I think science appeals to me more as I’ve gotten older,” comedian David Huntsberger mused into the phone. “‘Cause of the varying hypotheses on stuff, the attempts to explain human existence. It always seems to be pursuing that. I mean, what the hell are human beings, and why are they…
Some will tell you that comedian Neil Hamburger wasn’t born in a traditional sense, that he instead materialized in the coat check of mid-scale pizza parlor off the I-30 frontage road in Atlantic City. Hamburger speaks in a collective “we,” and whether he’s including his phantom “management,” adoring fans or…
Dallas Theater Center now has a full-time playwright-in-residence. He is Will Power, recipient of a fat grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is spending $3.7 million to support new playwrights-in-residence programs at 14 regional theaters across the country. As DTC’s in-house playwright and a member of its artistic…
Gavin Cleaver is the Observer’s British barbecue correspondent. I’m not a consistently funny man. And while I’m a huge fan of stand-up, I’ve never looked at it and thought “I could do that!” I might be mildly funny in text format sometimes, but in text I have the chance to…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. LOL! at the House of Blues Local comedy stalwart Paul Varghese will be celebrating his birthday on Saturday in the best way possible — a show featuring some of DFW’s hottest comics all…
Seeing Pegasus Theatre’s one-and-only annual production of a “black-and-white play” is as much a New Year’s ritual for some of us as eating a good-luck bowl of black-eyed peas. Lucky then for theatergoers who both have and have not seen a Pegasus comedy, this year’s show is a delicious revival…
