While every major touring comic pops into Dallas, our local comedy scene is often overlooked. We’ve got the talent, it’s just scattered all over the metroplex. House of Blues is going to make it easy on you and showcase the best comedy acts in the area on Saturday at LOL!…
See also: Second Thought’s Bomb-itty of Errors Playwright Charles Busch always plays the leading lady in his en travisti comedies on a New York stage. But Dallas actor Coy Covington is so close to Busch’s league of broadly comic cross-dressing broads that the playwright takes tips from him on how…
There used to be a family joke in the Morpurgo farmhouse in Devon, England. Whenever the phone would ring at odd hours or during a meal, dad Michael, author of more than 100 children’s books, or his wife Clare or one of their kids would say, “Answer it. It might…
Dromio and Antipholus of Ephesus have long-lost identical twin brothers named Dromio and Antipholus (they live in Syracuse). The two sets of servants and masters collide in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Second Thought Theatre ends its eighth season this weekend with the final performances of its spoof of the…
Shout hallelujah! Come on, get happy! Coy Covington is back in a Charles Busch comedy at Uptown Players at the Kalita Humphreys Theater. The Divine Sister presents the divine Mr. Covington, Dallas’ finest interpreter of Busch’s en travisti roles, decked out in full penguin garb as the preternaturally sunny Mother…
The puppets have found their people. Theatre Too’s local debut of the musical Avenue Q is such a hit, the run has been extended an additional six weeks. Since it opened earlier this month, every performance of the show has been sold out. Looks like audiences love laughing along with…
Find more theater events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. The monthlong Festival of Independent Theatres, redundantly nicknamed FITfest, opens at the Bath House Cultural Center this weekend. Eight plays, each shorter than an hour, are performed in rotating repertory, Thursdays through Saturdays, over the next four weekends (July 13-August 4). It’s the fourteenth…
What do you do with a B.A. in English? Learn to make lattes? Live with your folks? Or buckle down and create something fresh, funny and smart like Avenue Q? If you have it in you, do it. If you’re still in college and think you might have it in…
Rolling off of last year’s success, the Uptown Players announced that, following popular demand, a previously unplanned Dallas Pride Performance Arts Festival has just been scheduled for September 9-15, coinciding with the 29th Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade on September 16. (Applications for which can be found here, with an…
No doubt about it, getting gorgeous actors into Bible-based musicals and Shakespearean tragedies definitely ratchets up the “let’s go see it” factor. Right now Dallas/Fort Worth stages have a bumper summer crop of beauts, male and female, trodding the boards. It’s hard to winnow the list to a mere 10,…
Quick, while temps have dipped slightly below heatstroke levels, make plans to catch Shakespeare Dallas’ Twelfth Night at Samuell-Grand Amphitheater. You can take a picnic or sack of snacks with you. Flop onto your blanket or low lawn chair and soak up some culture as the sun sets over cottonwood…
Playwright and SMU grad Beth Henley won a Pulitzer for her 1981 Southern gothic comedy Crimes of the Heart. Interesting to note that the 1981 Pulitzer for fiction went to John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. It was a good year for literature about idiots in Dixie. Crimes, now…
Among things you can see in Dallas Theater Center’s production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Wyly Theatre: Old Testament characters playing basketball and plugged into iPods; a giant wooden pyramid that breaks apart like a cool toy from a museum…
The folks from Old Murder House Theatre warned me last week that the only way to make it through their live reenactment of Jurassic Park was to hold onto my butt. And held on I did. From the moment the first park worker was devoured by an imaginary Velociraptor to…
Leave it to director René Moreno (profiled in this week’s “People” issue) to find a way to make Coriolanus hot. For Shakespeare Dallas’ first production of this rarely done bit of Bard, Moreno cast the easy-on-the-eyes (and ears) actor Alex Organ in the title role. He plays Shakespeare’s lonely warrior,…
The audience-goes-crazy moments are cleverly written into the book of Jersey Boys, the long-running hit Broadway musical on view at the Winspear for three more weekends. Frankie Valli and his three pals, known as The Four Seasons, start out singing on street corners in New Jersey and work their way…
A flood of flawed heroes! An abundance of bounders and bastards! A cavalcade of troubled characters has arrived on summer’s stages. First up, because he’s heavily armed and insists upon’t, is Coriolanus. William Shakespeare’s lonely Roman warrior is a fierce 5th century B.C. battlebot with nothing but contempt for common…
Kent, you lost me at “and four.” Do you think you can dance? Do want to “co-star” in Dallas Theater Center’s just-opened production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Wyly Theatre? DTC posted a challenge this week on its Facebook page. Joseph director/choreographer Joel Ferrell is offering…
Update 11:07 a.m.: Louis C.K.’s show sold out in nearly twelve hours. Read more in our followup: Louis C.K.’s Plan Worked, and You Can’t Buy Your Way Out Of It. Update 2:06 p.m.: A second show has been added, later the same evening at the Majestic. Awesome. The subject line…
Dallas actor Cameron Cobb played Hamlet in 100-degree heat in Samuell-Grand Park last summer for Shakespeare Dallas. He portrayed numerous roles, male and female, in Kitchen Dog’s excellent two-hander The Turn of the Screw this spring. Now it’s his manifest destiny to occupy the title role in Theatre Three’s rude…
Nobody does big American musicals like Lyric Stage, the Irving theater company that does only musicals and only in the biggest way possible. Their season-ender, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 70-year-old classic Oklahoma!, brings the show back to where it started, with all the usually omitted songs back in place, 30 singers…
The singing, dancing cowboys in Lyric Stage’s Oklahoma! compete for your attention this week with the singing, dancing seventh president in Theatre Three’s Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson. With Jersey Boys and its singing, almost-dancing quartet of lovable mooks back in town for a month-long run at the Winspear, there may…
