The three-act French opera Samson and Dalila, first performed in 1877, seemed like an odd choice to start the Dallas Opera’s 2017-18 season. But Friday’s opening-night performance proved that it has stood the test of time. Composer Camille Saint-Saëns recognized that opera is all about drama, and Dallas Opera’s interpretation…
Texas Hold ‘Em Tournament Trinity Hall 5321 E. Mockingbird Lane 7:15 p.m. Monday Free Someone once said that if you’re playing “a friendly game of poker” then you’re really not playing poker at all. Poker is a game of deception, psychological manipulation and occasional cruelty. It’s about fleecing your fellow…
A Lifetime channel reality show that uses a team of relationship experts to pair strangers in wedlock is casting its next season in Dallas. Individuals who are “single and brave,” “appear to be between 26 and 35,” have “exhausted all dating options” and are “ready to find the love of…
Maggie Betts’ Novitiate bears all the signs of an exceptional talent. It follows the experiences of Cathleen (Margaret Qualley), a teenager who enters a convent in the early 1960s just as the Catholic Church was starting to undergo the reforms of Vatican II. The title refers to the girls’ yearlong…
South Park airs on Comedy Central Last year, just days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone told a reporter that the next season of their show wouldn’t take aim at Trump, because “satire has become reality.” After 20 years of…
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold premieres Oct. 27 on Netflix Joan Didion has set an impossible standard for any documentarian who would want to cover her life. She’s essentially already done it herself, brilliantly, in her essays, novels and films. Still, Didion’s nephew, actor/director Griffin Dunne, takes a…
Fifty years ago, in 1967, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night and The Dirty Dozen rocked American cinemas. And somewhere in a field outside Pittsburgh, George Romero and John Russo were shooting on black-and-white 16mm film a low-budget movie that would found…
What’s it like to have millions of dollars to blow on fantasy gifts from the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book? We don’t have an effing clue. But we used our imagination. Here are four made-up stories about the people buying this year’s fantasy gifts. Get Madame Alexander dolls for a year,…
At first, it sounded like a flock of birds had been released into the back of the auditorium at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. The source of the high-pitched chatter became evident as dozens of fifth-graders from Garland ISD’s Watson Technology Center filed into the room. Even guest…
State Rep. Matt Shaheen of Plano has been one of the leading voices calling for the abolition of state spending and programs designed to help bring film and TV productions to Texas. Earlier this week, Shaheen used the growing sexual abuse scandal involving Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein to widen the…
Friday Pop quiz time! Without resorting to Google, name three ballets. Swan Lake, OK, that’s pretty obvious. Yeah, The Nutcracker’s another. Easy peasy, since Christmas is only two months away and that thing gets performed, like, a zillion times. But what’s another one? If you came up with an answer…
In playwright Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the droll, headstrong protagonist, Lizzy Bennett, tells her sisters that love is a game. So it makes sense that WaterTower’s production of the play, onstage through Nov. 5, opens with a basketball game. Actors sit on the benches, waiting…
Mattresses. Rock candy. Blenders. Knives. Pots and pans. Caricature artists. These are some of the things you’ll find in the vendor halls at the State Fair of Texas. Oh, and of course, pitchmen and women roping you in with witty puns and kitschy gimmicks. But behind the smiles and fluorescent…
Halloween is everywhere. Advertisements for haunted houses are all over our Facebook feeds, pumpkin spiced foods are stacked high in grocery stores and movie theater marquees bear the names of classic scary movies. This year, celebration of the holiday can even be incorporated into your skin regimen. I’ve been hearing…
ThursdayBy now, we know what to expect from House Party Theatre: surprises and unexpectedly good theater. The nontraditional theater company has racked up accolades since its inception in 2014, putting together smart and concise pieces that range from goofy to downright intellectual. HPT’s latest play, Shadow Woman by Claire Carson,…
In the opening shot of Only the Brave, a flaming bear — not just a bear that happens to be burning but one that looks as if it had been created entirely from fire — lunges at the camera in the middle of a blazing forest. The image returns a…
Improv comedy may seem like a trendy way for people to get out of their comfort zones on the weekend or a way to keep a crowd entertained with a two-drink minimum. But it’s also a form of philosophical strength training that applies to many facets of life off stage…
Capital Gaines: Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff hits bookstores everywhere today. The book is written by Chip Gaines of Waco, aka one-half of HGTV’s Fixer Upper. We read the book to fully understand how stupid stuff can lead to smart things and more about what the “rugged and handsome”…
The day you first hear Chavela Vargas is the best day you’ll have that year. A majestic and inimitable performer, and a lesbian trailblazer of gender nonconformity, the Mexican chanteuse stripped ranchera music to its wounded heart, singing lovesick, masculine cowboy songs with a voice that holds hurting like liquor…
You’re right not to trust a film critic who calls a move stunning. But let me say this about Human Flow, the epic new documentary surveying the scope of the global refugee crisis, from Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei: It stunned me, in the truest sense of the word. Again and…
Just before the show started — after I’d taken my seat between Mom and Dad in the front row at the Dallas Theater Center’s in-the-round production of Hair — an usher started talking about the view we were going to get. Dad’s attention was on his Toblerone, but Mom saw the…
After a tour in South Korea, artistic director Joshua Peugh’s home away from Dallas, Dark Circles Contemporary Dance will open its fifth season in its hometown of Dallas this weekend. Big Bad Wolf and Les Fairies will focus on dance pieces inspired by cautionary tales, or as Peugh describes, “the ways…
