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…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Gabriel Iglesias at the Addison Improv The fluffy funny-man himself will be here this weekend at the Addison Improv. Iglesias (and that’s Iglesias with an I, no matter what the hotel clerk says)…
At this time of year, it’s nice to remember that a valiant angel, not Valium, got George Bailey out of his funk. If you haven’t yet reached the “bah humbug” threshold with the 1946 Frank Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life, the stage version subtitled A Live Radio Play and…
Filmmaker Judd Apatow lands in Dallas today to promote his new movie, This is 40, a raw, raucous look at three weeks in the life of an excessively good-looking American family. I saw it yesterday. It’s good. More on that later, from me and people way more qualified than me…
Second Thought Theatre artistic directors Kelsey Head and Steven Walters took their sweet time picking shows for the 2013 season at Bryant Hall. But maybe it was worth the wait. This small theater, along with Theatre Nouveau 47 and Fort Worth’s Trinity Shakespeare Festival, made season lineup announcements nearly simultaneously today…
In this week’s Dallas Observer, we chronicle the history of Jack Ruby, All-American Boy, perhaps the best play ever produced by Dallas Theater Center. It’s on a surprisingly short list of American plays that have dealt with the JFK assassination. Among the best: Macbird, a 1967 satire by Barbara Garson,…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. If you can still walk after stuffing your face full of turkey, mashed potatoes and whatever passes for cranberry dressing in your house, head on over to these shows to laugh off some…
Here’s how lack of attention to detail sucks the funny out of a big musical comedy like Crazy for You, the show packed with Gershwin songs and wedged uncomfortably into Theatre Three. In a scene in the second act, two female characters meet for the first time. They are rivals…
Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, in front of live TV cameras in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. He shot him again on April 23, 1974, before a live audience on the stage at the Kalita Humphreys Theater. The moment when the paunchy, oily-haired Dallas…
Did you know that the Mall of America in Minnesota is where the government Operation-Dumbo-Drops all of the obese people you’ve lost contact with? Jim Norton does. They’re totally fine, he said. No need to worry. I checked out Norton’s show at the Addison Improv over the weekend, and it…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Jim Norton at the Addison Improv Heard every weekday morning on the Opie & Anthony radio show and seen everywhere from bookshelves to Louie, Jim Norton is an angry force to be reckoned…
With his comedy special Please Be Offended out on Netflix, Jim Norton has taken to the road again with all new material. He called in from New York before leaving for his weekend of shows at the Addison Improv, and he actually sounded rested. He’d had a nap, apparently. See…
“Better 50 enemies outside the house than one within,” says an old Irish proverb. In the tiny, moldy Connemara cottage that’s the setting for Martin McDonagh’s tense 1996 drama The Beauty Queen of Leenane, both residents have one sworn enemy — each other. Now running at Kitchen Dog Theater in…
If Burying Our Father, the biblical whatchamacallit at Undermain Theatre, is supposed to be comedy, it needs to be funnier. If it’s supposed to be performance art, it needs more original moves. If it’s supposed to be a slightly too-long, goofy Sunday school pageant performed by a likable older couple,…
Something funny comes to the Winspear on Thursday with the one-night-only performance of the family-friendly one-man show MacHomer, actor-writer Rick Miller’s comic adaptation of Macbeth using characters from The Simpsons. It’s an inspired idea that Miller, a Toronto-based actor, launched in 1995 and has performed around the globe ever since…
“I’m calling her.” It was Saturday night at Hyena’s in Fort Worth, and Sean Kent, the comic, had commandeered the cell phone of a middle-aged woman who made the mistake of answering her daughter’s call during his show. After a string of text messages detailing Kat’s conception (one incarnation involved…
When news hit my Twitter feed yesterday that Louis C.K.’s next stand-up special — the one based on the act he blessed Dallas with last month — would premiere on HBO, my first reaction was: Oh, that download-forever thing didn’t work. Too bad. I liked paying $5 for some funny…
