The Lion in Winter King Henry II of England has plans for sons Richard, Geoffrey and John. But Henrys long-imprisoned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, has other ideas about succession to the throne. In James Goldmans talky, sexy two-act drama, the Plantagenets go at each other hammer and tongs on a…
Doing the marathon of Dallas and Fort Worth’s seasonal gallery events is like eating at a buffet restaurant. You scoop up a smidgen, walk a bit, spoon over some more, round the corner, grab something else. But we have some advice: Just because it’s a buffet doesn’t mean you can’t…
Thursday, March 25 We had no idea that opiates, smuggling and white slavery are the three pillars of comedy. Playwright Charles Busch and the Pocket Sandwich Theatre apparently have the inside track, though, since the theater’s production of Busch’s Shanghai Moon involves all three. Oh, right, it’s a spoof. Now…
We witnessed the arc of a real-life character over the past two decades. We first met Lady Diana Spencer in the media when she was a 19-year-old kindergarten teacher’s aide in 1980 and followed her life to its ultimate conclusion some 17 years later, in August 1997, in a car…
3/27 Parents suffer “sticker shock” for the new baby even before he or she is born. Kids will cost you, and their yard work potential won’t begin to cover it. Take a lesson from Daddy Woods, who had Tiger out on the golf course at age 2, or Papa Williams,…
3/29 For young hockey players struggling with feelings of athletic ineptitude, there’s no greater confidence booster than seeing two teams of untalented aging radio personalities decked out in full gear, staggering across the ice like Bambi on a particularly clumsy day. To boost the self-perception of those within viewing distance,…
3/25 Oh, those crazy Chick-Fil-A cows. Whether they hold up kooky signs with badly spelled pleas for their lives or dress up in cute outfits to elicit mercy from potential meat eaters, they ultimately seem to fail at halting the dominance of beef consumption in the United States. If those…
3/31 Sometimes it’s best to let people speak for themselves, especially when they use an intriguing combination of words that also describes everything in the simplest way possible. So, when Our Endeavors Theater Collective hailed its own upcoming extended performance of Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, or The Green Pill,…
The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories arises from the unlikeliest of sources–a series of domestic studies conducted in the early 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. The mission of the Home Research Institute, as far as anyone could tell, was to chart the…
Oh, dear. Angelina Jolie’s made another bad film. Is it too soon to give up on her yet? There’s no denying that Jolie is sexy as hell. The tattoos, the knife collection, the exhibitionist streak, the bisexual vibe she gives off…totally hot, no question. Given her work with the U.N…
Contrary to what you may have read or heard about Charlie Kaufman, the alleged phantom menace of screenwriting, he does indeed exist, so far as one can tell from a long phone conversation with a man said to be Charlie Kaufman by publicists who have no reason to lie. For…
Like many a drinking binge, James McLure’s evening of companion comedies Lone Star and Laundry and Bourbon starts slowly, picks up momentum and ends with a boisterous, boozy crescendo. Now onstage in a cracking production directed by Cynthia Hestand at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the pair of related one-acts takes…
Dallas is a city that thrives on the artificial. That bellwether of 1970s and 1980s greed and flaccid angst–and oh, yes, drama–the television show Dallas, long ago put the city’s affaire d’amour with artifice on the map. Dallas proudly told the world that it loved the artificial and did so…
Once upon a time Uptown was a neighborly neighborhood that rolled peacefully from the Hotel Crescent Court north to Lemmon Avenue past the Hard Rock Café, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary and Bread Winners Bakery with that trolley that nobody ever rides. But that was before Post Properties started its endless…
Thursday, March 18 Only the absolutely nerdiest shindigs require their own specialized dictionaries. Latin club, Klingon conventions, Scrabble championships–all havens for people who never got to spend their own lunch money. But they’re also full of people who take themselves very seriously. Just check out Word Wars, the 2004 Sundance…
So we have this pet peeve involving T-shirts. We don’t mind a good vintage one or even an ironic one once in a while. What we loathe, however, is one in particular. In bold letters, it shouts, “One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor!” It has a certain fratty and…
3/18 It was that low-speed car chase in the ever-recognizable white Bronco that first introduced us to Los Angeles trial lawyer Johnnie Cochran. Critics claim he was the first attorney who dealt the “race card” when he defended O.J. Simpson. And whether or not you think he’s a monster for…
3/20 We advise you to be careful when you tell potential roommates, landlords or dates that you have 1,203 pets. Because while most people will tolerate your grouchy cat, overactive dog and long-lived betta, they freak a little when you tell them you keep 1,200 worms in a big plastic…
3/19 Politics have become as ubiquitous among Texas women as big hair. It’s at dinner meetings, cocktail parties and salon visits, sitting alongside the heavy-duty hair spray and combs. At 7 p.m. Friday, you can check out the queen of Texas politics (and queen of big hair) when former Texas…
3/19 On every urban street corner, huddled outside office buildings like knots of Afghan women under the Taliban, today’s smokers are a dying breed. They fight extinction by adapting to a hostile environment. They’re socially shunned outcasts, driven to maintain a pack-a-day habit outside, fighting human nature, braving the elements…
If you were a college-aged East Berliner in October 1989, chances are that your time was occupied by one of several things. Protesting comes to mind, as does hacking at long-reviled concrete. Perhaps you caroused, or lit fireworks, or sang with joy as you coursed through the newly open streets…
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a man has recollections of a soured relationship erased from his brain, may be the most romantic movie in recent memory, if you will pardon the unforgivable pun. Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, it’s about many things–how we’re…
