When Kitchen Dog Theater mounts a new play, you put on your theater loafers and show up. This weekend, the well-oiled comedy machine mounts a new translation of Swiss playwright Max Frisch’s mid-century classic, The Arsonists. This comedic parable focuses on a town that’s struggling with a serious arson problem,…
I never thought the DVD would fall from grace so quickly. The digital media revolution was inevitable but who knew it would happen so fast? Places like Netflix, Crackle and Hulu haven’t just eliminated the need for a DVD player to watch movies. Traditional broadcast and cable television may very…
In a month marked by pioneering modernism, concert standards take a backseat to rarely performed masterpieces by the likes of Charles Ives, Gyorgy Ligeti and Bela Bartok (yes, more Bartok, again!). The nights are now longer, and the air is taut with its first chills of the season–it’s just the…
Christopher Nolan’s space epic Interstellar is a big, ambitious picture but it didn’t connect with our critics. We discuss the film at the top of this week’s podcast before moving onto a few other notable films on screens large and small this week…
Unfasten your seatbelts. There are no bumps on this ride. Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, that quaint morsel, is on at Dallas Theater Center. That’s because this fall Dallas Theater Center is doing big things with old shows no one has been clamoring to see again. Consider this: For its…
Imagine if nerdy Clark Kent didn’t have to remove his glasses and pocket protector to save the world. Then imagine him as fat and sweet as a marshmallow. Meet Big Hero 6’s Baymax, Disney’s new cuddly champion: a waddling, inflatable health care companion who can sense your pulse, diagnose disease,…
Laggies gets adult loneliness — and cross-generational friendship It’s an unwritten rule that we’re supposed to feel most in step with people our own age, as if sharing the same cultural and historical references somehow enables our ability to look into each other’s hearts. So why do we sometimes tumble…
Dallas-based artist Patrick Romeo creates a site-specific show at the Dallas Public Library in the Lillian Bradshaw Gallery. Existing both in real life (IRL) as well as in digital form, Romeo crafts road signs and traffic cones that lead to nowhere, while a computer-generated voice reads poetry. Stop by the…
There are different levels of artistry: one on, there is art made for the sake of aesthetics; on another, there is art that goes beyond the purpose of appealing to people visually or aurally and seeks to effect social change or provide social documentation. There’s nothing wrong with art that’s…
When you hear about someone who is called “the poet of the violin”, you automatically peg them as someone who spent their childhood tethered to a string instrument. Joshua Bell did have a knack for the violin as a child, there’s no doubt, but he didn’t lose his younger years…
While not out to reinvent the wheel, the audio-visual artists in Flinching Eye Collective are out to sidestep the conventional expectations of performance art. A project that explores the connections between video, sound, and physical environment, FEC channel the ghosts of thinkers like John Cage and Marcel Duchamp to host…
You, sir, look like you could use a fancy new pocketsquare. Or a bowtie. Look, if you’re going to reach your full potential as a dapper gentleman, you might want to check out Caviar Club’s menswear line. Because nothing says swanky like caviar and club. Stroll into the Winter trunk…
In daily life, pretty is quite the compliment. Sure, it may rank lower than beautiful or stunning. But every good flatterer knows the power of telling a woman she’s pretty. In art, pretty is perjorative. You want to insult a serious painter? Tell her that her life’s work is pretty…
You’re not a true movie geek until you’ve been to the Alamo Drafthouse at least 1,312 times. They’ve become a growing mecca of pop culture goodness as new locations spring up all throughout the country. We’ve been gifted with our own theater in Richardson but one theater can’t truly house…
Think of the Continental Gin building as something of a dormitory for the artistically inclined…like UNT’s storied Bruce Hall, except the artists of the Continental Gin probably don’t stuff their pockets with boxes of cereal every morning and slink back to their studios to sleep until noon. They’d probably like…
As more dance companies opt to dance alongside recorded tracks, Avant Chamber Ballet is a local dance company committed to performing with live music. It’s made them a go-to company for dance and music lovers. Recently they launched a concert series (Just music, no dance). This weekend, the second in…
Inspiration can be found around every corner in Dallas. Artists funnel it into work they present to an audience that greets it with exuberant applause. But sometimes that relationship can be a bit more reciprocal. At Monologue Jam, the audience provides the inspiration, giving improv performers a prompt that they…
Hmm. Now that I think of it, I can recall only a couple of snatches of music from Alfred Hitchcock films: the screaming violins from the shower in Psycho and the thrumming from the scene with the swinging lamp, when Mother showed her face. Of course, the master director must…
Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. At least we hope. Shakespeare Dallas and AT&T Performing Arts Center are presenting all of William Shakespeare’s works and the 19th on the list is The Two Gentleman of Verona. If you skipped this story in high school, then here’s…
Like all great satirists, David Sedaris realizes that the best way to explore the foibles of human nature is to jump on the grenade and let all of your deepest fears and secrets splatter over every page. He can slice through just about any cultural taboo that the PC police…
Everyone’s got a story to tell, even if they don’t think their life is all that exciting. The story of the Thanksgiving where you left dinner early to bail your boyfriend out of jail is actually a potential legend in the making—something your kids will confide to their kids on…
The fifth anniversary season of The Nasher’s Soundings concert series begins with cellist Alisa Weilerstein in recital., and the offering is really something special. Before Bach’s six cello suites, there existed exactly zero compositions for solo cello. They remain some of the finest pieces of music Bach — or anyone…
