Michelle Rawlings Loves You This is so over. Or maybe it’s just starting. Honestly, who cares? Dallas’ panties were collectively bunched yesterday as images from Michelle Rawlings’ — daughter of Mayor Mike Rawlings — upcoming art exhibition, Empathicalism, circulated. Blame it on the dildos. Or on the Photoshopped cover of…
Strap in for a serious two hours and 15 minutes of dark, talky religious drama in David Ives’ New Jerusalem, now onstage at Fort Worth’s Stage West. But what a great ride it is. The time, place and subject are set in the lengthy subtitle of the fact-based play: The…
The idea for this Sunday’s Stripper Spelling Bee at Baby Dolls was first created in Montreal a few years back and didn’t include professional dancers as contestants. Strip spelling’s father, scientist and medical illustrator Sherwin Tjia, just kinda thought it would be fun. His contest operated under basic framework: take…
It’s 1992 at the start of In the Land of Blood and Honey, and Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) and Danijel (Goran Kostic) are about to hook up at a Bosnian nightclub when they’re interrupted by a bomb blast. A few months later, Ajla is one of dozens of women rounded up…
A mushroom cloud blooms over Manhattan at the opening of The Divide. We see it reflected in the tearful eyes of Eva (Lauren German), who’ll spend much of the subsequent movie watching and waiting. She and eight other building residents, including her French fiancé, Sam (Iván González), manage to get…
A holy hot mess of the sacred and the inane, Joyful Noise, about a small-town Southern gospel choir, lifts from Usher’s “Yeah!” to give us this inspirational lyric: “Now God and I are the best of homies.” The film is Jesus for Gleeks — no surprise, since writer-director Todd Graff’s…
In the first scene of The Iron Lady, which re-teams director Phyllida Lloyd with her Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep, eightysomething Margaret Thatcher is presented as a little old lady unfit for the fast-moving world outside her hermetic London townhouse. The bulk of the movie takes place in an even…
Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s hit play, Carnage, stars Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet as two sets of Brooklyn parents whose social, economic and philosophic differences are leveled in less than 80 minutes by their common pettiness and immaturity. Posh pair Alan and Nancy…
“I want to go on living after my death,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary around the age of 14. She wanted to be a professional writer when she grew up, a novelist maybe. Her book, she said in the diary, would be based on the two years she spent…
When a stranger runs up to you and steals your watch, you’ve been mugged. When David Blaine chats you up, and is then holding your watch in his hand, you’ve experienced illusion! It’s an important distinction to understand if you’re going to see Blaine tonight at the Winspear Opera House;…
Games of chance and great causes go together as well as burgers and Sharpie pens at Adair’s Saloon. Sure, one could roll the dice an hour north of Dallas in hope of supporting the cause of their bank account in a casino. But that gambler has to deal with the…
Long ago, before there was Glee, public school offered five or so broad tracks that defined a student’s social circle and extra-curricular activities. (We mean legitimate tracks, stoners and gangs are another story.) You had your pageant girls, your jocks, the science kids, the band dorks and the speech/drama/debate nerds…
Actor Hal Holbrook has portrayed Mark Twain longer than Samuel Clemens did — 57 years for Holbrook, who first performed a version of his one-man stage show as Twain in 1954, versus 47 years for Clemens. So it’s not surprising that the white-wigged, mustachioed, sardonic, witty grandfatherly archetype Holbrook has…
Chuck Norris, with his mastery of roundhouse kicks and face punches, is a natural choice to star as a comic-book hero. Sadly, Norris and the Karate Kommandos lasted only four issues. Veteran inking artist Sam de la Rosa left his mark on that series and other heavyweight credits like The…
It’s easy to become a jaded, bitter misanthrope when you live in a world teeming with anonymous Internet comments, negative status updates and Fox News. Constant connectivity has done a lot of things for a lot of people, but it also brings out and magnifies the jerks. It’s totally refreshing…
In a few years, Tyler Perry has become a powerful presence in popular culture with a barrage of movies and television shows, such as Diary of a Mad Black Woman and House of Payne. But before his successes in the film industry, Perry crafted for the stage plays and musicals…
Not in calendric sync with the other big Asian New Year celebrations (Chinese New Year, Tết, etc.), Japanese New Year traditionally brings all of the fun, festivities and tasty treats to us on the first day of the new year. Luckily for us, the Japan-America Society of Dallas/Fort Worth is…
If you were to see an X-ray of Pablo Francisco’s cranium, it would be a meticulously constructed Rube Goldberg device. The sassy sorority voice kicks into drive a monologue about boning, which triggers a reaction in his human beatbox cortex. This series of bits, impressions and musical mockery continues to…
“I’m Jewish on my parents’ side,” says chanter extraordinaire Krishna Das in the press materials for his appearance Monday at Unity of Dallas, 6525 Forest Lane. Yes. Well. Let’s not speculate about how Passover Seder went at the former home of (also former) Jeffrey Kagel, a “Long Island rock ’n’…
Hey girlies, let’s chat. We all know how traditional ladies’ nights go down: You and your besties get dolled up, have cheap drinks, catch up on each other’s lives and then, BAM! Vultures. Sexual scavengers dip down to prey on girls who have had one too many and annoy the…
For nearly a decade now, Democrats have had the upper hand at the polls in Dallas County with family lawyer Darlene Ewing at the helm as county party chairwoman. And if changing a historically red county to blue seemingly overnight wasn’t impressive enough, Ewing and the party have had to…
Most fairy tales have a villain, whether a big bad wolf or wicked witch, but one of the most peculiar has to be the impish Rumpelstiltskin. Little men dressed as elves aren’t typically frightening, but a little man trying to snatch a lady’s first-born child is. In the Brothers Grimm…
