thursday january 9 Dallas Video Festival: For in-depth critical appraisal of the tenth annual Dallas Video Festival, check out this week’s Observer coverage by Arnold Wayne Jones and Jimmy Fowler. For a tirade about the unfair bias many people hold against video, read on: It’s certainly true that the tacky…
Conservative politicians and district attorneys across the country always seem to be waging battles to shut down sexually oriented businesses. But the largest and most successful adult newspaper in Texas is finding its worst enemies have come from within. The Metroplex Sundown, a Dallas-based weekly that circulates throughout the state,…
As electronic technology advances, video is increasingly becoming the most accessible and personal mass medium. Even the lowest-budget film is an arduous exercise–in terms of both technology and expense–compared to making a video. In video, there’s no painstaking development of negatives, no tiresome editing of celluloid strips, and–particularly for emerging…
friday january 3 Attack of the Killer Mutant Leeches: Fans of bad cinema practically declared a day of public mourning when Comedy Central announced it would cancel “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” (whose creator, by the way, will be honored at this year’s Dallas Video Festival January 9-12). While some of…
I must admit that I wasn’t anticipating with delight Theatre Three’s perennial holiday production of The Fantasticks. Nothing against the nice folks at T3, but I’m the kind of fellow who considers seasonal sentiment a prison sentence. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker when she was a New York stage critic for…
thursday december 26 The Fantasticks: If you want to experience a holiday show that features no rat kings, no charming little handicapped kids who say things like “God Bless Us All, Everyone,” and absolutely no warnings about the perils of materialism, then Theatre Three has a theatrical tradition that might…
There were two different performances happening the Saturday night I saw Deep Ellum Opera Theatre’s production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s holiday classic Amahl and the Night Visitors. One occurred when I closed my eyes, and it was easily the most charming of the twins–the voices of the performers were alternately…
If some doubted that the 20th-century black Sunday sermon doubled as spectacular theater, a story distributed last month on the Associated Press wire should convince otherwise. Apparently, African-American evangelical Christian churches in upstate New York have become hot tourist stops for Europeans vacationing in America. Tourist buses have made Sunday…
We’ve been hurtling down the highway toward Houston for two hours now, and it’s time for a potty break.MMOur driver turns her plush, 50-seat bus into the Conoco Travel Plaza somewhere south of Dallas, and a bevy of nationally known celebrities pours out. Most of them are young women, dressed…
thursday december 19 Peter and the Wolf: Besides offering its typical detailed stage design and original puppet and marionette creations, the nonprofit Dallas Puppet Theatre offers a musical/educational undercurrent to its holiday production of Peter and the Wolf. The mischievous hero known as Peter and his animal pals each represent…
thursday december 12 Synthetic Pleasures: By all means, make plans to catch Iara Lee’s droll, kinetic feature documentary, Synthetic Pleasures, before it ends a one-week run on December 13. Resplendent with MTV-inspired samplings from animation, various film stocks, and expressionistic editing techniques, the movie looks at the one significant way…
Local tidings A Loving Christmas Mark Loving Independent release Mark Loving is a music critic’s worst nightmare: a man who’s always singing to himself around the house and at work, so family and friends finally prevail on him to make an album. Probably a really nice guy. Fingers tremble as…
Dallas-based performance artist Dalton James fills his newest one-man show at the Swiss Avenue Theater, Wet Willie Loves Pyro, with all kinds of personal details–failed romance, family deaths and conflicts, childhood dreams, a leaky air conditioner that nearly drives him mad. At least, we assume that these are personal issues,…
thursday december 5 Wet Willie Loves Pyro: Dallas-based actor-writer-poet Dalton James offered local audiences a rich, thoroughly lived-in performance earlier this year in Open Stage’s production of Nicky Silver’s jet-black family comedy Fat Men in Skirts. James lured us through his funny-scary transformation from a timid, Katharine Hepburn-obsessed mama’s boy…
They just don’t make purely theatrical animals like Noel Coward anymore, eccentric creatures with greasepaint for blood and a gloriously pathological need to project their own cultivated persona onto every character they write and perform. Like many of the playwrights-actors-composers of his generation, Coward erased the line in his own…
friday november 29 BR5-49: Take a listen to either their debut EP Live at Bob’s or their recently released, self-titled debut album on Arista, and it’s clear why BR5-49 have earned an ecstatic following by folks who normally pooh-pooh roots country…and have been condemned as a bunch of pretty-boy smartasses…
There are many reasons why Jonathan Tolins’ The Twilight of the Golds should become obsolete in just a few short years–or so you think as the Dallas premiere by Littlefinger Productions unfurls in front of you. Unfortunately, this problem plagues many scripts concerning contemporary gay themes, because as the gay…
thursday november 21 Taking Back Our Democracy From Corporate Domination: If anybody thought that the two major American political parties cater to vastly different interests, the snoozefest of a 1996 presidential election should have put that to rest. For all the hullabaloo about race, sex, and other white-hot cultural issues,…
Countless playwrights have this century tackled the Spanish legend of Don Juan, the man whose insatiable appetite for women represented what could be considered the first feminist cautionary fable. Even those writers who have explored the comic possibilities in Juan’s winding trail of broken hearts have rarely ignored the serial…
friday november 15 Twilight of the Golds: There are a whole lot of hot-potato topics that get tossed around in Jonathan Tolins’ drama, The Twilight of the Golds, and you can bet Little Finger Productions and Actors’ Theatre of Dallas, the two companies that have joined forces to premiere the…
Feminist literary critics have tap-danced on the grave of every dead white male in the Western canon of letters…except for William Shakespeare. Willie the Shake has by and large escaped the scorched-earth academics who have reduced the likes of Milton and Marlowe to smoking cinders. The conventional wisdom is, in…
“Pornography,” Randy replies. It is rather more than I expect to hear, having interviewed a half-dozen men on the floor of Texas Stadium during the Promise Keepers rally. Dallas is the latest stop on the Promise Keepers tour, a traveling stadium revival that has allowed Christian men to make a…
