The Five Best Comedy Outings in Dallas This Weekend, September 14-16

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…

My Oh Yes

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…

Ten Must-Hear Classical Music Shows in Dallas This Fall

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…

The Five Best Comedy Shows in Dallas This Weekend, September 7-9

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…

Stage West’s Around the World in 80 Days is an Amazing Race

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…

The Five Best Bald Actors on DFW Stages

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…

Cruising with Neil Labute Down the Autobahn.

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…

Sweeney Flawed

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…

It’s What’s Inside

“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…

LOL at House of Blues: Deep-Fried Dilemmas and Other Home-Grown Jokes

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…

Stage West’s What the Butler Saw Should Be Good. It Really Should.

Find more theater at dallasobserver.com/calendar. In good farce, there shouldn’t be time to breathe. Farce moves. Its momentum picks up speed. When you’re watching well-done farce, you should be laughing so hard at the sheer pace of the comedy you get mad at yourself for missing some of the dialogue…

The Long and Short of FIT

Women who talk to God, to a coyote, to a therapist and to the world at large speak their minds in four plays, three of them world premieres, that hit the stage over the second weekend of the month-long Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center. There…