There is no better season for reading a book than winter. The cold chases you inside to the respite of a warm coffee, the licks of a freshly lit fire in the fireplace. In your hand? A new book you’ll devour to keep your mind occupied. But in this winter…
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin is the Taiwanese director’s first foray into the martial-arts genre. It may also be his most resplendent film yet: Watching it is like floating along on a sumptuous gold-and-lacquer cloud. Hou favorite Shu Qi (who also starred in Millennium Mambo and Three Times) plays Nie Yinniang,…
Oh Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…
Rule No. 1 of British “panto”: Be ready to play and sing along. No, go ahead. You’ll enjoy it. The panto is a traditional form of British children’s theater that pops up at the holidays. A little naughty, a whole lot nice, pantos are typically based on familiar fairytales and…
Sometimes, you just find yourself with this impossible urge to have your tarot read. Or, hell, learn how to read the tarot yourself. Maybe you want to figure out palmistry so that you can finally learn when Mr. Right is going to wander into your life. You start to research…
What good reason might explain actor Leah Spillman being clad only in skimpy pink panties and a sheer white tank top in her first scene in Kitchen Dog Theater’s The Totalitarians? In the sexist and unsexy four-character 2014 play by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Spillman’s character, Francine Jefferson, is an ambitious…
Composer Mark Adamo knows what you are thinking when you hear the words “Christmas opera” (he can see the sugar plum fairies dancing across your mind). “It’s an opera about Santa Claus as a young boy,” he says with a laugh. “People hear that and they start looking for their…
Now that Thanksgiving is over, we’re now officially on the countdown to the end of the year. The cultural calendar starts to look a little bit bland throughout the holiday season, what with all the symphony Christmas carol performances and theatre performances of, well, A Christmas Carol. This week, though,…
William Baker has us all beat. He’s filled with knowledge, humility and seriously some of the best taste in Dallas. (That sounds weird, but we mean he has great taste. Not like he has the best, Taste in Dallas!) Anyway, bullet points!!! Childhood: Baker saved his money and shopped for collectibles…
There’s so much to be grateful for in Dallas culture, it’s difficult to limit the counting to two hands. But here’s my best attempt. The Dallas OperaBy the end of this year, the Dallas Opera will have produced three opera world premieres in under 12 months. They gave us the…
In a 2001 interview, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the reaction of a CBS executive who attended a screening of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” shortly before it was scheduled to premiere, on December 9, 1965: “Well, it’s in the TV Guide logs — we gotta put it on the air. Nice…
Who knows what started the trend, but adult coloring books are a thing. And we don’t necessarily mean adult like raunchy, of course, we’re not opposed to that either. Two of our favorite places, the library and the sculpture center, organized groups of local artists to create outlines of various…
Before America succumbed to the insane ravings of right-wing media nut-jobbery, the only “war on Christmas” was one based in the notion that the birth of Jesus was exploited for profit by retail businesses. There was too much Christmas in the public square, said solemn theologians and some politicians in…
An important part of running a gallery is observing people at your shows, reading the room, noticing who is engaged with the work, and talking to people. You notice body language: the way perspective buyers keep circling back to a certain piece while others are there to appreciate the work…
Friday, Nov. 27 Cinewilde’s La Cage Aux Folles If you’re in the mood for a madcap comedy that was originally an award-winning music, head to Texas Theater for the one-night-only showing of La Cage aux Folles. It’s the story of two gay men, Georges and Albin, who run into a bit…
Imperfect people struggling to free themselves from messy circumstances can make for good drama. But actors fumbling with accents and mumbling lines as they play those imperfect people — as they do in Undermain Theatre’s The Night Alive by Conor McPherson — just make a mess of a pretty good…
The big breakthrough in Legend, the latest well-crafted studio throwback from writer-director Brian Helgeland (Payback, A Knight’s Tale, 42)? At long last, here’s one movie with two often incomprehensible Tom Hardy characters, sometimes muttering their Cockney swears at each other inside the same scene. Hardy plays twins, real-life gangsters who…
The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…
Bob Birdnow’s Remarkable Tale of Human Survival and the Transcendence of Self is a work of fiction that puts TED Talks to shame. Local filmmaker and playwright Eric Steele has completed The Midwestern Trilogy he started back in 2008 with an absolute gem by adapting this one-man show into a…
The first sound you hear in Stage West’s production of The Heir Apparent is a tremendous fart. That could serve as commentary on the rest of the play. Playwright David Ives’ flatulent adaptation of a fluffy 18th century French comedy is written in rhyming couplets. All of it. Hours of…
If you’re looking for a specific breed, there are quite a few organizations dedicated to matching pets with a forever home. The Golden Retriever Rescue of North Texas, for example. But sometimes it’s more specific to a connection with an animal. Sometimes you’ll meet an animal and know. And if that’s how…
Thanksgiving week isn’t generally a time when most of us are able to get out and about. After pretending to work Monday through Wednesday, the luckiest (or unluckiest, depending on your own situation) among us will head home for a Thanksgiving feast with the family. Once that’s all over, though,…
