If Monty Python had been around in William Shakespeare’s day, Will’s play The Comedy of Errors would have gotten him a gig on Saturday Night Live at the Avon. The shortest of Shakespeare’s plays, the comedy was first performed in 1594 and is a hilarious, fast-paced tale of coincidence, sharp…
Every night in Dallas County, about 2,800 abused or neglected children are sleeping in protective care. Each month, 100 to 150 children are removed from their homes. Woe to the Child Protective Services caseworker who leaves a child in a marginal home only to have him killed by a parent…
Five years ago, an arts organization called Imagination Celebration Fort Worth (ICFW) invited Arturo Rodriguez, a Mexican student studying music at TCU, to write a symphony in honor of bringing arts awareness to youngsters. Since then, Rodriguez’s 44-minute symphony has been played around the United States and Mexico and has…
Inspired by a true story, Osama was the first film made in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. After the brutal Taliban regime bans women from working and forbids them to leave their homes without a male escort, a 12-year-old girl and her mother find themselves on the brink…
The Texas Ballet Theater goes back in time in this month’s sumptuous presentation of The Sleeping Beauty. Premiered in 1890, the classic ballet was created by Russian choreographer Marius Petipa, who worked closely with composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Choreographer Ben Stevenson kept much of Petipa’s original work in his 1967…
Everybody’s thinking pink during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so Firehouse is sponsoring a Think Pink cocktail and dinner party with the Dallas Chapter of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. All the food and drink is pink, from pink champagne to pink martinis to pink salmon. Can’t make…
I recently rented the movie Cabaret and, of course, Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey again knocked my socks off. It’s the part Minnelli was born to play. But I’d forgotten what a fascinating story wrapped around the music. Set in Germany just before the rise of Hitler and the Nazi…
Visiting the Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park gives visitors a glimpse into Dallas and North Texas life from 1840 to 1910. Kids especially love touring the 38 historic structures that have been moved to the park’s 13 acres. But buildings don’t reveal the struggles early residents had in…
The International Day of Peace, a day of non-violence and ceasefire, was established in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly, and it’s been pretty much war all over the planet since then. But we can dream, right? Peace—First Inward or First Outward? is the name of an art exhibit…
When his girlfriend said she wanted to go to the Minyard’s grocery store on Live Oak Street, Entre Karage looked up from the game of blackjack he was playing and nodded. The store was only a block away. “But go right home after that,” he told Nary Na. A pretty,…
Ask Dallas residents how Reunion Arena got its name and very few will tell you of Francois Fourier and his colony “La Reunion,” which settled in Dallas more than 150 years ago. Dr. Charissa Terranova—the Dallas Observer’s visual art critic—lectures on Fourier’s philosophy and the colony’s history in a talk…
The trend on Broadway is taking great movies and making them into musicals. It worked great with The Producers, OK with The Full Monty. Now comes a play based on one of my favorite comedies, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. In the movie, the pleasure was in the duel between Michael Caine…
Filmmaker and journalist Quin Mathews turned his camera on an unusual artist for his latest film. The one-hour documentary Beyond the Plane looks at the innovative three-dimensional constructions of Rusty Scruby, a Dallas contemporary artist who has studied aerospace engineering and music composition. (One of those overachievers who couldn’t pick…
“Writers are shameless spies,” wrote Tennessee Williams. All the pleasures—and pain—of the writer as voyeur provide the core of Vieux Carré, a little-produced drama by Williams. Based on a year the author spent in the French Quarter of New Orleans from 1938 to 1939, Williams portrays the various inhabitants of…
More than 25 attorneys, playing in seven different rock bands back-to-back, in the “ultimate battle of the lawyer bands.” It’s called Law Jam, and it benefits the Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program, which annually helps about 3,300 families too poor to hire a lawyer. So, OK, we’ll go along with the…
Explore your domestic kink at the Home & Garden Show. You know you are a shelter magazine junkie when Cottage Living is jostling Metropolitan Home for space on your coffee table, when Martha Stewart Living is competing with Architectural Digest in your bathroom and when you go to bookstores looking…
As culinary crimes go, Sweeney Todd is one of the most delicious. The barber who seeks revenge on the judge who framed him discovers he has a thirst for blood and is soon slicing the upper-crust throats of 19th-century London. He teams up with an enterprising neighbor who has a…
Sixty-one years ago, 35,000 Marines stormed the island of Iwo Jima in one of the most horrific battles of WWII. More than 6,800 men died in five weeks of combat, commemorated by photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his photo of six Marines raising the American flag…
With titles such as The Wedding Diaries, Sinfully Sexy and The Wallflower, author Linda Francis Lee is a one-woman chick-lit factory. Now the former Dallas debutante and former Junior Leaguer tackles The Devil in the Junior League. The devil who wears Prada might meet her match in Fredericka Mercedes Hildebrand…
Remember the TV show Hogan’s Heroes? Those wacky guys at Pocket Sandwich Theatre have another production that spoofs the silly wartime comedy of the ’70s, The Great Escape with Steve McQueen and the granddaddy of all POW movies, Stalag 17. Allied POWs try to outsmart, out-snoop and outlast their captors,…
You might want to think twice about complying the next time you hear “spread ’em.” We’re not talking about your last encounter with the Dallas SWAT squad. We’re talking about the delicate matter of laser hair removal. This week a court hearing is scheduled for Jimmy Earl Adams, owner of…
I spoke with Ole Anthony, founder of Trinity Foundation, during eight interviews–more than 25 hours of conversation, covering everything from theology to televangelists to drugs. Though often in pain, Anthony proved to be an intelligent, always fascinating conversationalist. A very brief excerpt follows. What has been happening at the Trinity…
