Thursday, March 17 First of all, Noel Coward never should have titled his play Hay Fever. It pretty much ensures that we’ll never see it, read it or think about it positively. See, all we can think of is itchy, watery eyes, sneezing and more sneezing. We totally admit that…
Pasquale Scaturro says this is the most dangerous thing he’s ever done–and the closest he’s come to dying. For most people, that could describe an unsettling car accident, seeing a bear on a camping trip, a grease fire at home or simply getting tangled in the entertainment center’s power cords…
3/19 Renaissance GayBINGO sounds like the Resource Center of Dallas’ worst GayBINGO idea yet–so snooty, so pretentious, so boring. But then consider one of the hallmarks of Renaissance art: nudity! Expect mostly nude angels, mostly nude men, mostly nude women and mostly nude men dressed as mostly nude women. We…
3/19 Yoga intimidates me. I’d like to sling one of those trendy purple foam mats over my shoulder and lotus my way to inner peace and thinner thighs. But I have a touch of skepticism and stiff joints–both thanks to my father’s genes. But when I chatted with Tzivia Stein-Barrett,…
3/20 We’ve all had one of those friends–the kind who will listen intently as you vent your problems, maybe hold your hand, nod sympathetically, hand you a Kleenex, then once you’ve had your say, tell you how much worse off he or she is than you. For these pals, a…
3/17 When Jeffery Stanley writes a play, he tells it from the heart. As George Clooney says in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, “It is a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.” So don’t expect Stanley’s characters or plot to always follow logic. In…
Performing the role of a costumed character is challenging. You have to remember to use the character’s voice all the time, even when you’re just telling Pete the checker that you’ve gotta hit the bathroom. If you’re a silent creature, that means you keep those lips shut even when little…
If you saw the Dallas Observer ads touting Matthew McConaughey as the grand marshal of the 26th Annual Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade, perhaps your imagination got the better of you. Maybe you envisioned the major motion picture star sitting high on his float, extra-whitened teeth gleaming, chiseled jaw…
3/13 Quick quiz for parade fans: Is an Irish car bomb a dangerous explosive device or a dangerous but tasty beverage? If you answered “a,” then the Downtown Dallas St. Patrick’s Day Parade is your kind of party. If you answered “b” you might be too hung over from Saturday’s…
3/12 You can write a check and feel good. You can walk a 5K, feel a little tired and eat some free food. Or you can walk 60 miles in three days during a Texas summer, feel really tired and really, really sweaty and possibly earn sainthood. That’s the Breast…
3/13 Normally, it’s fun and–we hope–a bit engaging to add some cheekiness to the local events that help make our city, well, a city. Upon an initial glance at a five-day citywide drive called St. Baldrick’s Day, our eyes rolled sevens on references ranging from inevitable heredity to fashion trends…
3/15 Tracy Turnblad is fat. She has big hair. She wants to spend her life dancing. But in one of those things that happen only in movies, she lands a spot on a local TV dance-off, wows the cameras and becomes, of all things–given not just her weight but, more…
“From the creators of Ice Age,” boasts the poster for Robots, which is no ringing endorsement. That 2002 animated feature, a sort of Three Mammals and a Baby in a prehistoric setting, looked and felt every bit as frigid as its snowbound scenery; it was impossible to warm to a…
Everyone with a TV remembers President Bush in the flight suit, landing on that aircraft carrier, standing in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner and triumphantly declaring that major combat operations in Iraq were over. Two years on, many feel like asking what exactly he meant by that. Gunner Palace…
The chilling oddity of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall is not limited to the fact that it’s the first mainstream German film to grapple with Adolf Hitler–six decades after his death. Set, for the most part, in the underground Berlin bunker where the Nazi dictator spent his last days, this is a…
Frank Stella’s boisterously painted sculpture from the 1980s is phenomenal in a muffled way. It operates something like the Doppler Effect, heard in the ever-quieter acoustic waves that trail behind the siren of a passing ambulance. Like those receding sounds, these bright and mangled heaps of aluminum and fiberglass follow…
Vasco Araújo The most striking quality of Vasco Araújo’s video showing in the Project Room at Conduit is its references to two related strains of thought, style and ideological practice–namely classicism and fascism. Running in a 15-minute loop, “Hipolito” unfolds according to the interaction between disparate visual and sound narratives…
The Frog Prince Halfway through this enchanting performance by the Kathy Burks Theatre of Puppetry Arts, the puppets stop the show. The puppeteers (Douglass Burks, B. Wolf, Sally Fiorello, Patricia Long) act surprised as they remove the black hoods they hide under to manipulate Burks’ intricately painted, handmade rod puppets…
Thursday, March 10 The decline of Atkins and the South Beach Diet has made the world safe for orange juice, grape jelly and pasta–heavy, loaded-with-carbs, need-a-nap-afterward pasta. The new catch phrase is “portion control.” We’ll start that…just as soon as Maggiano’s Little Italy completes its month of dinners/cooking demonstrations called…
The novel Be Cool, written by Elmore Leonard in 1999 while the ink was still wet on the publisher’s advance, existed only because the beloved writer of seedy thrillers and westerns knew it was guaranteed gold–the sequel to the 1991 hit novel Get Shorty that, in 1995, became a hit…
Come this time next year, The Jacket may well occupy the slot in movie discourse that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does now–that of the film that coulda-shoulda-woulda received more Oscar nominations if only it hadn’t come out so early in the year and been forgotten by those with…
Richard Greenberg asks a simple but intriguing question in his play The Violet Hour, now onstage at Dallas Theater Center. Given a peek into the future, would any of us take an existential do-over and alter the decisions we made early in life? Charles Dickens used the same device in…
