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…
It’s around this time of year that everyone’s holiday buzz begins to fizzle, and the glow of enthusiasm that met the late year celebrations wanes into exhaustion. We all get the holiday hangover, but there is an energetic and live antidote to those blues that you may not have thought…
“I was in the hospital, and it was my first year with a smartphone,” Aaron Aryanpur said, recalling the removal of his misbehaving gallbladder. “So while I’m in the hospital, I’m looking up everything. WebMD’ing everything. The Internet is this ridiculous rabbit hole. Next thing, I’m on these message boards,…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. John Caparulo at the Addison Improv John “Cap” Caparulo earned his own half-hour Comedy Central Presents, which recently aired on TBS, and is now a part of Blue Collar Comedy: The Next Generation…
Alex Bentley over at CultureMap Dallas liked This is 40 less than I did, which is totally fine. He makes some solid points, including some that I touched on when I babbled in Apatow’s general direction a couple weeks back. But this strikes me as somewhat insane:…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. This is 40 We’re starting the list with a movie this time. Why? Because it’s Judd Apatow, that’s why. This is 40 follows Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) from Apatow’s 2007…
If Dallas theater gets much better than it was in 2012, Chicago’s going to be jealous. Dallas’ theatrical community used to lose a lot of homegrown talent to that city with the wind. (And to New York and L.A.) Not so much anymore, as the number of theater companies, performance…
Do you like the DC Comics version of Batman? Do you like the circus? If you’re a fan of these two frankly disparate concepts, then the American Airlines Center has something for you over the next few days. But is this something any good? Judging by last night’s opening performance,…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Loni Love at the Addison Improv Named by Variety and Comedy Central as one of their Top 10 Comics to Watch, Love has been seen on VH1, Chelsea Lately and even CNN. This…
Secrets of time travel are revealed in On the Eve, the high-flying new musical at the tiny Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park. According to the whimsical script, written by Dallas actor Michael Federico, all you need to float back and forth across centuries are a hot air balloon, a Hula…
Back in 1964, a rotten movie called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians introduced a child actress named Pia Zadora in the role of a mirthless Martian child. Zadora would go on to become a mirthless singer and actress who briefly shot to semi-stardom when she won a Golden Globe in…
Chip and Monica of Good Morning Apocalypse, the perky morning show trucking along following the end of the world, try to stay upbeat. But it’s pretty hard when your camera is a Tide bottle and a Capri Sun box, and one of your co-hosts is dead. See also: At the…
Darnell, a recently adopted 9-year-old street kid, can’t believe his dad never figured out his real name. It’s engraved right into his silver grill: D-A-R-N-E-L-L. Thinking he had no name, his dad’s been calling him Peter since adopting him and bringing him back to God’s country (Southlake). Get it together,…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Shawn & Marlon Wayans at the Addison Improv These two brothers of In Living Color and White Chicks fame are in Addison Thursday through Saturday. Come see ’em bust out some tandem comedy…
Once again, ’tis old-coot season. That’s what Christmas theater is, right? Time to celebrate the eccentricities of crotchety old men, some with beards, some without. If there’s a grand vizier of geezers, he’s Ebenezer Scrooge, star of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Dallas Theater Center’s big and boisterous annual production…
One Thirty Productions changed the name of Truman Capote’s 1956 short story A Christmas Memory to the more generic A Holiday Memory for its current matinees-only offering of the sentimental three-character dramedy at the Bath House Cultural Center. Actor John Davies is this show’s lovable old coot, narrating recollections of…
There are 23 people in the cast of Jekyll & Hyde, but the real star of the show is lead actor Constantine Maroulis’ hair. It shimmers, it glistens, it flips, flies and flaps. It goes back in a long ponytail when he’s playing brooding Dr. Jekyll and falls down in…
Free movie screening crowds are an odd beast, and the crowd at AMC NorthPark for last night’s screening of and Q&A for Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 was the epitome of a Free Movie Crowd: film nerds, Apatow fan boys and people who just love free things. See also: Before…
