The spring theater season begins with WaterTower Theatre’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, which isn’t a “fringe festival” at all but a juried collection of plays, solo performances, dance and music on three stages. This year’s event, running through March 23 (and co-sponsored by the Dallas Observer), features 19…
Leave it to Wes Anderson to make a film about World War II without mentioning Germany. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, a wundercabinet set in the fictitious Eastern European Republic of Zubrowka circa 1932, Anderson captures the collapse of a kingdom and rise of a reich without so much as…
Think adapting War and Peace is hard? Try adapting the race car video game Need for Speed. Tolstoy’s 1,225-page behemoth has nothing on the Electronic Arts franchise’s irreconcilably complicated 20-year, 20-installment history: Sometimes cars are subject to physics; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re invulnerable; sometimes they break. Maybe you’re in…
According to lore, Liberace used to greet the tourists who’d come by bus to gawk at his bejeweled home with the line, “I hope you like it. After all, you paid for it!” Not everyone has to like Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars, the feature-length incarnation of his much-loved television series,…
A wise man — or, more precisely, a wiseass trucker named Jack Burton — once opined that “it’s all in the reflexes.” Few actors have had better ones than Kurt Russell, who makes a welcome return to theaters this weekend in The Art of the Steal. Having been largely MIA…
As of this writing, the Netflix Instant catalog boasts more than 10,000 titles available for online streaming — a number that, as per the official Netflix rhetoric, seems colossal. But the landscape of this digital paradise may not be quite so idyllic. As classic film enthusiast Jaime Christley reminds us,…
March 17 may be St. Patrick’s Day, but anyone who’s been out of her house in March knows the month is largely — if not stereotypically — dedicated to celebrating all that is green, served with soda bread or speaks with a brogue. But instead of stopping the fun at…
Spring break is a major calendar destination for kids, marked in big letters in the middle of March and anticipated with an unparalleled zeal. Then you grow up, and spring break means trying to arrange child care or convince your offspring that staying home all day and watching The Muppet…
For most cat owners, purchasing a pet bed is, at best, wishful thinking. You really think Fluffy is going to curl up on some fancy cushioned item when there are perfectly good places already available for his daily 20 hours of napping? Say, for instance, the handmade quilt your late…
The term “chamber music” evokes some serious Eyes Wide Shut-type imagery — all hoods and cloaks and dark rooms bursting at the seams with woodwinds. The whole concept actually does hail from the need for (probably cloaked) royalty to whittle down orchestras to just a handful of folks who could…
The tiny town of Night Vale has been getting a great deal of exposure. It’s not the homemade pie in the local diner or the quaint bed and breakfast run by a lovely elderly couple that attracts such loyal followers. It’s the strange lights in the sky, the high school…
As a fan of daily newspapers, two dark days haunt me: when Bill Watterson produced his last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip and when Dave Barry stopped writing his humor column for The Miami Herald. I can’t tell you exactly what those days were because, obviously, being a newspaper fan…
Sometimes all a gallery exhibition needs is a backdrop of thunder or a quick burst of explosions. OK, maybe art doesn’t usually need those things, but they promise to make the new exhibition at the Reading Room a bit more exciting. Marfa-based artist Nicolas G. Miller’s sound and sculpture installations…
On Saturday, The Dallas Opera Guild presents its 26th Annual Vocal Competition at the Winspear Opera House. Some 20 young semifinalists – all with Texas connections- will sing their hearts out in front of an esteemed panel of judges, each hoping to impress them enough to take home thousands of…
Around 11 a.m. Saturday, dust off your green wig and drag your Irish-for-a-Day ass to Blackwell Street and Greenville Avenue for the 35th Annual Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade. (Good luck finding parking. You should most definitely take the DART. Or parachute in.) The Dallas Mavericks are the presenting…
When you die, you have two viable options: heaven or hell. I take that back; knowing you, there’s really only one option. See you down there, sucker. In the meantime, Fair Park’s Margo Jones Theatre opens a new play by (Ron) Alexy that plumbs the comedic depths of apocalypse. Heaven,…
If you don’t think hair styling is an art form then you’ve never seen this group of ladies and one gentleman work. Diary of a Badd Hairstylist is a hair show in which seven stylists compete on stage in front of you, the live studio audience. Each stylist has prepared…
Sometimes the moon looks like it’s winking at the little humans on earth, or maybe it’s just winking at me. Either way, many people have a fondness for the man in the moon and his magnetic pull. This tranquil reflection of the sun inspired a poem by former U.S. Poet…
If you’re a fan of anything in this world, there is a convention dedicated to it somewhere in the world. Of course, it’s not economically feasible to fly halfway around the world just to publicly declare your love in creative cosplay to the Saturday morning cartoon series Rubix, the Amazing…
If you’re obsessed with true-life storytelling, you’re not alone- there are others. Lots of them, fixated on the lives of so-called ordinary Dallas people who are proving to be anything but. Like Dallas native Nicole Stewart, who created Oral Fixation, a performance experience backed by an addiction to excavating stories…
Shakespeare wrote a lot of sonnets. Hundreds, actually. This, of course, led people to believe they couldn’t all be about his wife. Because, c’mon. In the 1970s English historian A.L. Rowse claimed to know the identity of Shakespeare’s mistress, commonly referred to as the Dark Lady. His research has fascinated…
If you feel like you’ve traveled down the Yellow Brick Road one time too many, you’re probably right. Count ’em: The Wiz, Wicked, need I go on? Wikipedia says there are 22 stage adaptations, if you count The Wizard of Oz on Ice. So why on earth would we recommend…
