Honey Boo Boo, reality TV’s hillbilly kiddie diva, has nothing on Puddles Johnson, a tiny titan in the world of glitzy tots with fake tans and snap-in flipper teeth. As Puddles and her adorable rival, Chevrolet Corningfield, battle it out to become “Miss Alabama Haystack” and “Miss Texas Twinkle,” their…
Dallas Theater Center’s next main event sounds like a knockout. Or, more accurately, it hopes to bring the “white heat.” Kristoffer Diaz’ Pulitzer-finalist play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, opening October 19 for 26 performances at the Wyly Theatre, is set in the world of professional wrestling, where “white…
Mitch West is a local comedian whose one-man show, “No, But Seriously,” played at the Dallas Comedy House this past weekend. I sat down with him at Angry Dog for some much needed carbs and peppered him with questions a couple of days before seeing the show. Here’s what I…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Mitch West at the Dallas Comedy House benefiting the DREAM Fund Comedian Mitch West will perform his half drama, half comedy show (we refuse to say dramedy) “No, But Seriously” this Saturday at the Dallas…
See also: Holy War Horse There’s a Lot of Great Theater Opening in Dallas in the Next Week So a couple of snooty critics and uptight theater patrons are upset about a sketch in The Second City Does Dallas, the new Dallas Theater Center comedy that just opened at the…
It gives us pleasure to confess that Frank Loesser’s snappy show tune “Big D” (little-A, double-L-A-S) helps spell success for two productions that just opened in local theaters. The song is a by-god, knee-slapping showstopper as performed by Catherine Carpenter Cox and Alex Organ in the second act of Lyric…
See also: 11 Must-Do Parties For Fashion’s Night Out In Dallas If you’re like a lot of people I know, you’d love to go hear a classical music performance now and again. But saying you’d like to go hear some art music and actually remembering to do so are two…
See also: Holy War Horse There’s a Lot of Great Theater Opening in Dallas in the Next Week The annual fried chicken and loud cackling session known as the DFW Critics Forum luncheon was lighter on both grease and arguing this year. The group reached unusually strong consensus on menu…
See also: 12 Awesome Things To Do In Dallas This Weekend, September 6 to 9Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. We’ve been doing this since Thursday, September 6, 2012, so we’ve really got it down. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Is the recent surge in political…
What a trip! Stage West’s production of Around the World in 80 Days is featherweight comedy that floats along nicely, thanks to the steady breeze stirred by the constant motion of its five hard-charging actors. Director Jerry Russell keeps the pace frantic throughout this immensely amusing farce, lest we notice…
See also: Dallas’ Seven Best Post-Theater Hangs Dallas doesn’t really have a theater “season.” With more than 50 professional and semi-professional companies crowding the stages, there’s hardly a weekend when there aren’t new shows popping up. But the weekend starting September 6 presents a crazy-busy blitz of plays and musicals…
How did Uptown Players prepare for the first local production of the hit Broadway musical The Producers? Step One: They snagged actor B.J. Cleveland to play the leading role of sleazy Broadway showman Max Bialystock. Cleveland is Dallas-Fort Worth’s Nathan Lane with one major difference: He actually shows up for…
See also: The Five Best Bald Actors on DFW Stages The circle of life for Dallas Summer Musicals is to find big shows based on popular movies and bring them back to the Music Hall at Fair Park season after season. Why else would they book return visits of The…
How do you get ahead as a theater actor in Dallas and Fort Worth? Try shaving it. Finding good roles is not a hairy problem for this quintet of talented gents who don’t mind that their scalps occasionally upstage them. Herewith (and hair without), our list of the best bald…
Unfasten your seatbelts; Autobahn isn’t such a bumpy ride. The seven short, intense two-character scripts by Neil LaBute, grouped as a “play cycle” under one main title, are being performed by Totally Wow Productions in the studio black box space at WaterTower Theatre in Addison. Each playlet is set in…
Actually, it’s a lot better than it sounds. A lot. Undermain Theatre just announced its 29th season, full of lusty Greeks, biblical farces and vampires that don’t sparkle. At least we don’t think they do. The experimental playhouse’s “Season of Myth” consists of four plays and three readings at the…
Any way you slice it, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street can be bloody good fun. Currently running at KD Studio Theatre in a production by the community theater group Level Ground Arts, the 1979 musical is regarded as one of the composer-lyricist’s masterpieces, a sung-through…
“There’s something awfully sad about happiness, isn’t there?” says the leading man in Noel Coward’s bubbly 1939 comedy Present Laughter. Oh, truer words, dahling, truer words. Happy to report then that it’s all smiles in Theatre Three’s smartly acted dollop of Coward froth. There are things that will make you…
See also: The Rise of the Understudies Over the next five years, the AT&T Performing Arts Center and Shakespeare Dallas will present all of William Shakespeare’s work, including every one of the plays and sonnets. If he wrote any mash notes or shopping lists, they’ll do those, too. The Complete…
Someday musical theater will unplug the jukebox and come up with new tunes. Just not anytime soon. Not as long as audiences are still paying to see shows patched together from the hits of yesteryear. Mamma Mia! does ABBA. Rock of Ages is wrapped around songs of 1980s “hair bands”…
It was a good weekend on Broadway for the Booker T. High School Class of ’92. Actors Brian J. Gonzales and Cedric Neal, who graduated the same year from Dallas’ performing arts magnet school, both stepped into leading roles in big New York shows on a moment’s notice. Gonzales, understudy…
The House of Blues over the weekend hosted the LOL! comedy showcase, which brought together four local comics for one home-grown show. Here’s what you missed, from Obed the Intern: – Aaron Aryanpur opened with homey quips about his 7-year-old son and Whataburger. Aryanpur joked with the audience about how…
