6/26 In Longview in 1953, my mom sat in a pink and white Ford Fairlane between her mother and grandmother and had an experience that changed her life. At 9, she was already an avid reader of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. On her lap, a black cocker…
6/26 Back when I taught high school, I spent every other Tuesday supervising an after-school skateboarding club. A handful of 14-year-old boys, you know the type–baggy jeans, black hoodies, in serious need of a sandwich. They scrawled anarchy symbols on their notebooks and plastered “Skateboarding Is Not a Crime” on…
6/28 Dude, Neil Slater is the jazz man testifyin’. He’s written 60 compositions for jazz ensembles, was nominated for a Grammy in ’93, chairs the jazz studies department at the University of North Texas and played piano when the immortal Stan Kenton of the Stan Kenton Orchestra couldn’t. On Monday,…
Behind frenzied and diligent art collecting one usually finds eccentric and extraordinary art collectors. Such idiosyncrasy and the museum go hand in hand as the labyrinthine spaces of yesterday’s collectors often become the public treasuries of today’s moneyed idlers and wandering intelligentsia. One need only look to the John Soane…
The Day After the Fair From an 1891 Thomas Hardy short story comes this moody, romantic little drama about a frustrated West Country housewife, her illiterate maid and the handsome London lawyer who steals both their hearts. The production by Theatre Britain, a local troupe of dedicated Anglophiles, casts Sue…
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas This show should be called “Dallas Collects Ellsworth Kelly.” It would be more honest, not to mention more intriguing. This dainty collection of top-quality painting and sculpture by the mid-20th-century artist does little service to the importance of Kelly. Kelly’s brightly colored and experimentally shaped opaque…
We participated in our personal Fear Factor today. There were no plates of sheep testicles or coffins full of rats. We didn’t jump from a tall building or climb giant monkey bars far above a body of water. We did, however, pick up a phone and call a clown. And…
Thursday, June 17 Can a photo or drawing of someone else be a self-portrait? Angstrom Gallery’s featured artists, Jack Pierson and Paul P. , prove through their intimate handling of subjects and detailed renderings of physical beauty and faults that a portrait of another can be just as personal. Pierson’s…
You aren’t quite sure who Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood are, but those names sound so familiar. Wait, weren’t they on that show with? Or didn’t they? No bells ring in your head. Lately, though, the comedians have received plenty of exposure, thanks to the improvisational bonanza Whose Line Is…
6/19 The first time my daughter ripped off a head and started to suck, it was a shock. It was Crawfest 2000, held in the Esplanade at Fair Park, and everyone was eating bugs. Big plates of crawfish and potatoes and corn were being devoured as everyone ignored the sweltering…
6/19 This ain’t your grandpa’s game of bingo…unless, of course, your grandpa is a hot-to-trot drag queen with killer legs and a love for all things fabulous. If that’s the case, then we want an invitation to your next family reunion, but we also think Gramps would love Dallas’ latest…
6/19 Enjoy an evening of outdoor theater, mirth and merry-making this summer with the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, which hires local actors to sweat in period costumes and gesticulate through some of the finest–and this year, the funniest–plays ever written. Performances are held in East Dallas’ Samuell Grand Park in…
You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956 that this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the Rube Goldberg gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg,…
It begins with the roar. That unmistakable sound, like an untuned violin being scraped against a rusty saw blade. Anyone with any exposure at all to global pop culture knows it; even Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin reused it in their otherwise unfaithful Hollywood remake. The credits, in Japanese, unscroll…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock down a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
Hardly anyone writes love letters anymore. Sigh. Real billets-doux, the kind penned in inky swirls on creamy paper, have given way to the crude shorthand of instant messages and the tinny squawk of disembodied voicemail. Try wrapping a satin ribbon around those. Back in the dark ages, B.AOL., as it…
6/17 In the unconventional tradition of Heather Whitestone-McCallum (the hearing-impaired Miss America 1995) and Rick Allen (the one-armed drummer for Def Leppard), 15-year veteran skateboarder Jon Comer scoffs derisively in the face of anatomical convention–and then beats its ass into submission with his sick Gringo board. Comer, a Keller resident…
The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it’s at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario plays…
Jehane Noujaim co-directed 2001’s remarkable Startup.com, about two Internet whiz kids who brokered just enough big deals to wind up with broken dreams, and the audience came away understanding how it felt to invest your everything in something eventually worth nothing. The headlines of five years ago came to bittersweet…
Questions about art, race, ethics and language spark passionate arguments in the provocative new play Permanent Collection, currently the main-stage offering at Kitchen Dog Theater’s sixth annual New Works Festival. In an elegantly designed and smartly acted production directed by Dan Day, the Thomas Gibbons drama challenges its characters (and…
Alex de Leon The question begs: What to do with art that makes avid if not heavy-handed political statements in an era so eager to wrest itself from the rant, screed and morality inherently connected with political art? Is it the responsibility of art to engender social revolution, much less…
A Flea in Her Ear The Classical Acting Company with direction by Greg Leaming morphs this turn-of-the-century French absurdist play into a swinging 1960s sex farce with as much innuendo as an episode of Laugh In. Originally written by Georges Feydeau in 1907 Paris, this new adaptation (also by Leaming)…
