Landlocked we are, but at 7 tonight at the Dallas Museum of Art, there’ll be a whole lotta surfin’ going on. Continuing the summer-long series of free Thursday screenings of movies set on beaches, DMA and the Dallas Film Society present director Dana Brown’s 2003 totally tubular surfing documentary Step…
The popularity of the bite-sized $2 tacos at five-month-old Rusty Taco on Greenville Avenue has had a direct effect on business next door at Desperados, the 34-year-old Tex-Mex landmark. “Our business has gone up since they opened,” Desperados’ manager Alberto Gonzalez told me the other day. “Some people don’t want…
Marvin Hamlisch has his EGOT. That’s Emmys (four of ’em), Grammys (four), Oscars (three) and a Tony. The composer of A Chorus Line and the film score for The Way We Were also has a Pulitzer Prize and three Golden Globes. So he’s got a PEGOT. (That that, Tracy Jordan.)…
The naked truth is, The Full Monty is a cock tease. You won’t see the full anything in this gently ribald musical, now onstage at Addison’s WaterTowerTheatre. The working-stiff characters who band together for a one-night-only all-male strip act promise to take it all off, but the big finale of…
Billy Aronson had a cutesy idea for a sex farce. Take a couple of “helicopter parents” who blow off work on their kids’ first day of school and give them the naughty notion of inviting other bored parents into their bedroom for a romp. That’s the premise of this bit…
Going to the annual Festival of Independent Theatres is a bit like tumbling down Alice’s rabbit hole. You jump in and hope for amusing diversions on the way to a soft landing. For four weeks, eight small theater companies, so small they don’t have their own home spaces in which…
Each summer the Festival of Independent Theatres puts Dallas’ hottest stage actors in a bunch of short one-act plays in rotating rep over four weekends. The 12th annual FIT fest, as it’s redundantly nicknamed, goes up tonight at the Bath House Cultural Center on the east side of White Rock…
Villain Max Mencken’s tired vocal cords forced the cancellation of last night’s performance of It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman! at the Dallas Theater Center. Actor Patrick Cassidy, who plays Superman’s nemesis, was ordered by a doc to go on “vocal rest” for a couple of days. With…
By the time the ladies of Theatre Too’s Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage start sawing up the body of a villainous Ukrainian drug dealer named Black Dog, the strange charms of this outrageous piece of grindhouse comedy will have firmly grabbed hold of your senses. Not known for taking…
A complete overhaul of the book of this 1966 Strouse-Adams musical has been achieved by comic book author and screenwriter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. The result is a fresh, new American musical comedy that has great possibilities for success beyond its current run at Dallas Theater Center at the Wyly Theatre downtown…
Exploding with forced fabulosity, the national tour of Dreamgirls currently at the Music Hall at Fair Park lifts the 1981 musical into the realm of high-tech spectacle. Visually, it’s a stunner. Spanning the stage are revolving walls of LED lights on designer Robin Wagner’s enormous, industrial-grid set. These become giant…
Slow biz and showbiz make for a good dining deal at Craft Dallas at the W Hotel in Victory Park right now. With dinner service falling off during summer doldrums, the restaurant is offering a special called “Stop, Dine and Roll” for arts patrons headed to evening events at the…
Just as this show’s girl-group, The Dreams, get a makeover on their way to stardom, the show itself has received an overhaul by director-choreographer Robert Longbottom. Though set in the 1960s, the 1981 musical now benefits from 21st century technical glitz on Robin Wagner’s video- and light-heavy industrial-metal scenery. Moving…
Yes, he flies. Superman, an American icon in blazing blue tights, red cape and sassy leather boots, soars into view and lands like a muscle-queen Peter Pan on the stage of the Wyly Theatre. In Dallas Theater Center’s bright, funny, downright inspiring remake of the 1966 musical It’s a Bird…It’s…
The animals take over the barnyard in this musical comedy for kids at Dallas Children’s Theater. But it doesn’t become Animal Farm. The beasties merely want pizza instead of hay for dinner and while Farmer Brown is on vacation, they want his city-slicker brother to come out and play with…
Jubilee Theatre in Fort Worth stages a marvelous, if LOUD, production of this August Wilson play, the ninth in his 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, but the first chapter in the overall saga of the American Black Experience, decade by decade. Aunt Ester Tyler (Cheryl Tyre) is 200-plus years old, a survivor…
Fluids of all sorts have cameo roles in Zayd Dohrn’s soggy new play, Long Way Go Down, getting its debut production in Kitchen Dog Theater’s current New Works Festival. In the small, spare office of a Phoenix trucking outfit where most of the drama happens, buckets catch steady leaks from…
As a countdown to the Dallas Observer’s “Best of Dallas” 2010, City of Ate is serving up 100 of the favorite dishes we crave, savor and hope to scarf down again soon. These dishes are in no particular order. Some are little known, others celebrated. Some are pricey, others can…
The most moving of three musicals that have just opened on Dallas stages is the little one with no orchestra, only two characters and a collection of songs, performed mostly a cappella, that never won a single Tony. It’s Black Pearl Sings!, now playing at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. More than…
“I never knew what true happiness was till I got married. By then it was too late.” Good line. And if you didn’t know you were watching The Dixie Swim Club, a comedy about five women renewing their friendship at an annual North Carolina beach weekend, you might think you…
Three writers from Asheville, North Carolina, came up with this 2008 mash-up of Steel Magnolias and Beaches, a comedy tinged with poignant moments among five women friends. Every August the former college swim team champs meet for a girls’ weekend at a beach house on the Outer Banks. In four…
Dallas diva Liz Mikel gets a plum role as a 1930s ex-con who sings up a storm, all the way to New York high society. Based loosely on the story of Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, this two-character play-with-music begins in the East Texas prison where Pearl is doing time for removing…
