La crème de la coiffure! A mock documentary about, of all things, a Scottish hairdresser who travels to America to compete in an international hairstyling tournament, The Big Tease is a mildly amusing romp that benefits enormously from an ingratiating performance by Scottish actor Craig Ferguson, who also co-wrote the…
Theatre Three prides itself on being the Southwest’s most frequent showcase for the works of Stephen Sondheim since 1969. The program for their newest effort, the complex and obtuse Company, features a photo of Sondheim onstage with artistic director Jac Alder. When the now 70-year-old composer came to Dallas in…
Suburban sprawl The ArtCentre of Plano has found a way to get its foot in the door of the Dallas art scene, increase visibility for its Plano programming, and create additional revenue. The nonprofit ArtCentre is now providing exhibition management and some curatorial support to Deep Ellum’s Mitchell Lofts Atrium…
My friends, both of them, have begun speaking in a new language. They often claim they are “beaten down” and “whipped” by things that once merely irritated them; they celebrate the “greatness” of those they admire; they refer to the inferior among us as “spares”; they greet each other with…
Ewan McGregor — you can’t toss a caber in Scotland these days without toppling a gaggle of blokes who closely resemble him. Yet some magical combination of talent, charm, and shrewd management has thrown wide the gates of choice projects for the young superstar, whose résumé already glows like a…
Ever pressed flesh with a machine? Scrunched your fat ass or angular cheekbone up against a copier’s glass and pushed “start?” If you have, then Dallas artist John Pomara believes you’re in a particularly good position to appreciate his art and his commentary on a technology-based culture and its struggle…
Valentine’s Day is really a day for love’s refugees — the single, the spurned, and those of us pining in that arid limbo between friendship and romance, with a who-knows-what-the-future-holds? dangling like a big, juicy carrot in front of us. With this holiday, we can sit back in our recliners,…
Folks who spent part of their college years watching Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson every Friday and Saturday night on HBO, and then CBS, can easily become confused about whom they actually hung out with back then. In my addled memory, when a couple…
It may come as no surprise that there’s a new book out in the For Dummies series. It’s called, of course, Art for Dummies, and it purports to alleviate the dreaded fear of art, a condition that strikes terror in the hearts of God knows how many people. Or so…
Not waiting for Guffman Just barely more than a year after a fire melted the mismatched seats, equipment, and an inventory of costumes at Grapevine’s 15-year-old Runway Theatre, the nonprofit will reopen February 4 with Nunsense — which is, according to former board member Francine Simpson, “the perfect show, since…
Director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s 1996 Scream was something of a breath of fresh air — a little of the slasher film’s familiar old holy-shit! mixed in with self-aware glances and not-so-sly asides. It offered nothing new — indeed, Scream often felt like a sequel to something –…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the United States for Farewell My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, this Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was…
Sharon Stone doesn’t appear on-screen until halfway through this tale of three lives unraveling, but when she does, she makes quite an impression as Rosie, the third player in a horse-racing scam. Adapted from a play by Sam Shepard, Simpatico jumps back and forth between the present day and the…
Contrary to the press clips, there is no musician more difficult to write about than Garth Brooks. How do you describe a shadow? How do you get inside that which is not there? So many millions of words have been spent discussing him over the past decade, yet he remains…
There was a time, not so long ago, when black men and women were lynched on a whim in Texas. When I say “not so long ago,” I mean within the span of a lifetime. Granted, in this case, it’s a very long lifetime — that of one George Dawson,…
Fest intentions Fort Worth advertising agencies were trash-talking Downtown Fort Worth Inc. last year when the nonprofit that puts on the Main St. Fort Worth Arts Festival (among other pro-Cowtown activities) chose a Dallas-based ad agency to promote the weekend-long spring event. Resource 3 in Dallas wrested the account away…
The name Mike Leigh has been attached to some intense, intricate, generally superb character studies in the past three decades. The man has pitted Gary Oldman (as a skinhead) against Tim Roth (as a slow learner) in Meantime (1981), explored the friction of reuniting Cure-fan college chums Katrin Cartlidge and…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six works had…
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of best-seller Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon, maddeningly sexy, to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about the woman who was regaled in her day…
What do, say, the Rolling Stones and West Africa have in common? How about Chuck Berry and Senegal? Or the Sex Pistols and the djembe drum? In his PBS series and accompanying book The History of Rock and Roll (1995), the late music critic and historian Robert Palmer deftly traces…
Can an alien and an earthling live together in peace? That may sound more like a lead-in to Jerry Springer — or the plot to Starman, Earth Girls Are Easy, and a thousand other sci-fi yarns — but, no, it’s actually the premise of Mr. Spaceman, the new novel by…
One of the late Charles Ludlam’s drag secrets was bird seed. Bird seed for breasts, that is. He discovered that, so long as you seal the pouches tightly, you were assured of mammaries that were pliant and shapely and shiftable, not unlike the real deal. People often accuse Ludlam of…
