It’s a jungle out there. The Mixmaster is looking for a few good writers to come along on our expedition through the arts and culture in Dallas. Ask yourself the following questions: Can you sniff out cool ways to spend the weekend? Do you wander into new shops out of…
Years ago Wesley Treat discovered an interest in roadside attractions. As a photographer, he’d found his subject and he started a blog to chronicle his travels. Around the same time two guys up in New Jersey had a blog called “Weird New Jersey” that eventually became a book and then…
Even paintings need to get out town for the summer. If you are driving through Dallas during the month of August, you might notice a few luminaries stopping by for a visit. Willem de Kooning is splitting time between Oak Cliff and the Cedars; Edward Hicks found a Peaceable Kingdom…
At WaterTower Theatre, time shifts to 1964 in San Francisco. Young Marines head out onto the town before they’re shipped off to a growing war in Southeast Asia. They are looking for a good time, hounding for women. Eddie Birdlace happens upon Rose, a young musician working a late-night shift…
Last fall, a small group of young actors appeared in the Bishop Arts District, mounted a gripping production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and then vanished. But not before promising an entire season of productions under the moniker Davis Street Collective. It’s the sort of thing that happens here too…
Celia Eberle’s work as an artist knows no restrictions. A lifetime Texas resident, Eberle considers herself a product of the “pine curtain,” a reference to growing up in Longview. For the past 25 years, she’s shown her work in and around Dallas, building an oeuvre that’s imaginative, surreal and occasionally creepy. Many times, one of her mixed media sculptures has sent an unconscious tingle down my spine.
Where did the summer go? It’s been a relatively quiet and cool one this year, and that can only mean one thing. That we’ve all been be resting and waiting for August to hit and for the performance season to start again. Dancers who have been gone all summer training…
Maribeth Monroe is one busy lady. She’s starring in a new dark comedy for HBO called The Brink about a geopolitical whirlwind that could bring about World War III. She’s gearing up to shoot the new season of Workaholics where she plays the perpetually stressed and enraged boss, Alice. Plus,…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. If you drove past The Basement Gallery during the day, you might not know it was…
When you walk up the secret staircase at the front of the lobby of the Texas Theatre, you’ll be taken up to a room with a simple, small window and a strange looking safe. This is The Safe Room. At different times throughout the year, it is made to look…
On this week’s , Stephanie defends her Guardians of the Galaxy review against internet trolls who tell her to go suck eggs, and we touch on Scarlett Johansson in Lucy and the excellent James Brown biopic Get on Up. There’s a lot to be had in this one. Enjoy…
It seems we can expect great things from Gavin Delahunty. Just two months into his tenure as the Hoffman Family senior curator of contemporary art, he’s making huge strides to bolster the Dallas Museum of Art’s interest in modern art. One such effort is his curation of an exhibition of…
A new TV show is trying to bring stand-up comedy back to mainstream television in a way that doesn’t pit eager chuckle monkeys against each other in a battle of meaningless challenges that have nothing to do with comedy. Two names who first took to the mic in Dallas’ burgeoning…
At 7 p.m. Friday at Ro2 Art, Erica Felicella invites you tell her all your secrets. Imagine if you had the opportunity to leave some of your worst memories, thoughts, and actions behind. Imagine if you could clear your head and heart by passing along burdens to another vessel and…
Chipping Smooth Immersive theater is not a synonym for participatory theater. So you won’t need to bring a monologue or warm up your vocal chords before attending Chipping Smooth this weekend. In fact, please don’t. It does mean that you will be part of the theatrical experience. You’ll be amidst…
Beware the movie that’s Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is not to have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyric to “Please, Please, Please” speaks, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
It’s little wonder that no theater until Dallas’ Uptown Players has attempted the bio-musical The Boy from Oz in the decade since it closed its run on Broadway. Hugh Jackman won a Tony in that Broadway production, starring as its flamboyant title character, bisexual Australian singer-songwriter-showman Peter Allen. When Jackman’s…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist, a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of a…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
Think about this night at the theater like you would any other one night stand. Except perhaps this time you’ll have wiled away the hours with a lively, charming man you won’t regret in the morning. For years, Rawlins Gilliland was a welcome voice on public radio, telling stories with…
