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…
Every week we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Bill Burr at the Majestic Theatre in Dallas The redheaded, red-tempered comedian from East Coast is back in Dallas Thursday night for an evening of high-pitched sarcasm, verbal inner dialogue and yelling into the…
A Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) is becoming a standard stop for celebs whenever they have something new to promote, or just some time to kill. Even Obama stopped by once. But the President didn’t say anything near as entertaining as the pros. Check out our favorite AMA answers from…
“I like criticism, but it must be my way,” said Mark Twain. That also goes for the actor Val Kilmer, currently portraying Twain at the Wyly Theatre (through April 22) in a one-man touring production he wrote and directed. To be granted tickets to last night’s performance of Citizen Twain,…
Every week we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. George Willborn at the Arlington Improv Attention, ladies: There is no magic dress. If you looked fat out of the dress, you look fat in the dress. Pearls of wisdom from George Willborn,…
By now, every media slob in Dallas has interviewed Val Kilmer. The 53-year-old actor’s been in town for a couple of weeks, rehearsing his one-man Citizen Twain show, playing April 18 through 21 at the Wyly Theatre. He wrote the one-act performance after a decade of research for a movie…
If only we could tithe to the muse who inspires the strange and wonderful plays Matthew Posey thinks up and puts on at his Ochre House theater. His latest, written and directed by Posey, starring Justin Locklear, Elizabeth Evans and Posey, is Dreams of Slaughtered Sheep, a two-act comic meditation…
The Joads do finally make it to California in The Grapes of Wrath. Though not without a great many problems. Now onstage at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, Frank Galati’s inelegant stage adaptation of the magnificent Steinbeck novel is directed by WaterTower artistic director Terry Martin. He’s put some seriously talented local…
Nobody’s doing children’s theater around here the way Jeff Swearingen, Bren Rapp and the kids of Fun House Theatre and Film in Plano are doing it. We liked their all-youth Man of La Mancha and were impressed by their all-kid Hamlet. Now they’re taking on a darker American classic, but…
Louis CK’s been popping up all over the place, which must mean he has a special coming out soon. *checks listings* Aha! It says here there’s a new HBO special this Saturday night, in fact, called Oh My God. Which is lucky, because I was just compiling the following excellent…
Every week we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Maz Jobrani at the Addison Improv A founding member of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, Jobrani likes to explore such safe topics as Iran’s wishy-washy nuclear program and Asians’ inability to drive…
At Denton Square Donuts, on an unseasonable cool April night, four members of Denton Comedy Collective sit at a table shellacked with Bible verses. Matthew Solomon, Robert Joseph, Alex Smelser and Ron Lechler are all 20-somethings trying to make it in the big, bad world of stand-up comedy. For them,…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Carlos Mencia at Addison Improv This Honduras-born comedian rose to superstardom with his show Mind of Mencia and a ridiculous catch phrase. His Comedy Central stand-up special, No Strings Attached, was a huge…
Programs handed out at performances of Rx at Kitchen Dog Theater should list possible side effects of seeing the new Kate Fodor play: sudden bursts of laughter, slapped knees, tickled ribs, split sides. And if you relate to the predicaments of the characters, perhaps some major waves of empathy. Such…
