Since when did the Nokia Theatre at Grand Prairie turn into a lecture hall? Just look at next month's schedule for what I thought was supposed to be a concert hall. On September 9, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the authors of Freakonomics, will bring their lecture tour to Grand Prairie, and they'll be followed two days later by 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who, like Bono before him in May, comes to the area as a guest of the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth.
But those three gentlemen are but the warm-up act for the summer's breakout movie star, some guy named Al Gore, who will bring his global-warming lecture to the Nokia on September 30. Tickets for the latter's appearance--prompted, no doubt, by the fact the Gore doc An Inconvenient Truth is a surprise smash in North Texas, as we noted here in June--went on sale yesterday, and good seats are still available (for $69.50, plus the $10.95 "convenience" charge, and, oh, the irony). I guess it does answer the question of whether Gore's going to run for president: Why pay to tour the country and speak for free when you can make 80 bucks a head doing the stage version of your hit film? I look forward to the musical version: I'm Melting!--Robert Wilonsky