Before besting a miserable field in District 8, James Fantroy told constituents at a debate this spring at Singing Hills Recreation Center that people in his district are worried about being poisoned by water siphoned specifically to South Oak Cliff from the spill-infested Lake Tawakoni. Paranoia is always one of our favorite traits in an elected official. It's even more fun when it's spiked with racial overtones. No wonder nobody votes in this town. It's kind of a logical choice to simply bag it and go to a movie.
TV news is suddenly crowded with 20-something models who stumble on words with more than three syllables and are never quite sure if famine in Bangladesh is happy news or sad. Tracy Rowlett reassures precisely because the years have bequested him with the opposite set of traits--some wrinkles, some schnozz, a bit of jowl and a dead-on news sense. When Rowlett relates a major story, we can tell that he himself knows what the story is about. We trust him never to announce with an engaging smile that Washington is under attack.
The DMA does not win by default. Dallas' one and only combines the best aspects of art museums from across the metroplex. It has the regional art and historical objects of the Amon Carter and Kimbell. It showcases new talent and cutting-edge, contemporary works as do the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Arlington Museum of Art. Its large, continuously displayed permanent collection puts it over the top, allowing it to highlight acquisitions in special-themed exhibits and retrospectives. Plus it looks ahead with community-centered exhibits (Dallas Perspectives on Art and Religion, its home companion to Seeing God: Art and Ritual Around the World) and its Concentrations series, which has focused on young artists such as Annette Lawrence, Shirin Neshat, and Richard Patterson.
With most theaters jobbing in actors (Dallas Theater Center gets 'em from New Yawk City, no less), a good old-fashioned repertory company is getting hard to find 'round these parts. Now in its second decade, the Kitchen Dog Theater's resident acting company still is composed mostly of SMU acting and directing grads (and professors) who created this theater for themselves 12 years ago (and named it after a reference in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot). In two acting spaces at McKinney Avenue Contemporary, artistic director Dan Day and his small band of gifted thespians--Tina Parker, Christopher Carlos, Tim Johnson, Bill Lengfelder--continue to create remarkably edgy and ambitious work in a nearly year-round schedule of full-length plays and cabaret shows. Always looking to shake up theatergoers' expectations, KDT has lined up a bold new season that includes Beckett's Happy Days (now playing), King Lear, George F. Walker's Heaven, the controversial prison play In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott and the Fifth Annual New Works Festival, including one main-stage production and seven staged readings.
If you had bought Theatre de Marionette season tickets for the little ones this year, you could have assured them of seeing fun, professionally done, European-style puppet performances of such kiddie classics as Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin & His Lamp, Peter Pan, and The Littlest Angel. This is not Freddie the Clown or Howdy Doody stuff. Russian puppetry artist Tina Gromova, who toured Eastern Europe and Asia with the renowned Moscow Puppet Theater, is this year's headliner. Recommended for kids 3-4 years old and up. Individual tickets are still available: $8 for adults, $7 for children.
If you're a fan of independent cinema--movies that don't suck, usually--here's the best deal in town, in the country...OK, in the world, whatever. Pay a small fee, and every other Sunday or so you can wake up a little early and be greeted by a sneak preview of a would-be art-house hit. Now, you won't know the name of the movie until you arrive at the theater, but the odds are good in this game of Reel Russian Roulette: Among the movies that have been part of Harlan Jacobson's Talk Cinema series are Gods and Monsters, Gosford Park, Sunshine State, No Man's Land, Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential and Breaking the Waves. The only downside is after the screening you have to listen to some local film critic, including on occasion some schmuck from the Dallas Observer, pontificate on the movie's meaning and the filmmaker's intentions before opening up the room for discussion. But, hey, that's the small price of being so danged special. For more information about Talk Cinema, which begins its new series September 29, go to www.talkcinema.com.