Shades of Gray Written by 21-year-old college student Brent Black, this two-hour musical revue makes light of life’s little oddities. Like, how does a lonely PlayStation addict attract “Player 2”? Or what’s the best way to get a shy guy and a shy girl to talk to each other? And…
Home to many a forgettable, popcorn-tossing, low-comedy melodrama, Pocket Sandwich Theatre now owns bragging rights to something pretty cool: the premiere of the first professional production written and directed by Brent Black. At 21, the kid from Irving is still a year away from his drama degree at the University…
John Waters, the self-proclaimed king of bad taste, filmed a 300-pound cross-dresser named Divine eating dog doo for Pink Flamingos and gave Selma Blair huge breasts to play the stripper Ursula Udders in A Dirty Shame. To Waters, those are in “good” bad taste. So what would the tyrant of…
Thursday, September 1 Be honest, you’ve already been to Sam’s Club and purchased your weight in Little Smokies, tortilla chips and jars of queso. The television screen has been so thoroughly cleansed it sparkles between speakers equipped with surround sound. This year you even went all out and purchased a…
“Relax and let God lead you.” Sounds pretty good, if I could only get that “relax” part down. But that’s what 31-year-old Renae McMillan is trying to teach women to do–well, Christian women. Wait a minute, Renae, we don’t like exclusivity, particularly when it comes to spiritual matters. What’s up…
Last blast before class 9/3 Kids can get away with things that would seem, uh, disturbing in adults: They can pretend balloon animals are real critters, sing at the top of their lungs even if they don’t know the lyrics, cover themselves with paint and glue and be active and…
Meet your zoo neighbors 9/3 Why leave Dallas on Labor Day weekend? The airports will be crowded, the interstate will be a mess and the gas prices will probably exceed the cost of milk per gallon for that three-day weekend. With so much hubbub, everyone is better off inviting out-of-towners…
T-Rex’s red carpet treatment 9/7 We heard a rumor that Dallas has famous people, so we scoured the pages of Us Weekly, People and In Touch looking for glamorous hometowners. Sadly, we came up empty-handed, unless you count a handful of reality TV personalities and the Wilson brothers. We like…
Steps in a new direction 9/3 When artists experiment with other genres, the results can be tragic. Take Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time”–the unfortunate song that sends a shudder down our spines when we think of actor-singers. Or, two words: David Hasselhoff. Then there’s Farrah Fawcett, who dazzled the…
Cineastes swooned over Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love, a slow-as-molasses melodrama about two tediously formal people whose spouses are having an affair with one another. Thrown together by circumstances, they find themselves falling in love but, determined not to emulate their cheating…
Terry Gilliam’s last film featured the former Monty Python troupe member as an eccentric, demanding and difficult director prone to destroying his ambitious projects before a single frame of footage was ever shot. “If it’s easy,” he says in the movie, “I don’t do it.” Alas, this was not a…
space-invaders The question begs: As painting morphs into so many new lives, doesn’t it at some point cease to be painting and become an entirely new medium? The answer to this question is less important than a productive riposte: Who cares if it’s sculpture or architecture when it leaks into…
Art Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning script calls for expert actors capable of making this talky play a tour de force. The three men onstage in this low-rent production–Howard Winningham, Tim Shane and Mark-Brian Sonna–aren’t up to the challenge. They don’t seem to understand the text (not to mention subtext) of this…
The first person we see in Contemporary Theatre of Dallas’ explosively funny production of Beth Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest is Carnelle, the leading character played by Jennifer Knight, practicing her patriotic tap routine for a Fourth of July beauty and talent pageant she desperately wants to win. “Boom!” she…
When it comes to blues, I am way out of the musical loop–like when I figured interest in rap would die out after The Fat Boys lost popularity. In fact, I’m not sure I could have more ridiculously underestimated the interest in the blues as a genre of music. See,…
Thursday, August 25 Next time a well-meaning but still highly irritating relative asks why we’re almost 30 and still not married, we’re going to say, “Because I blew my 401K on a really crappy matchmaker.” Too bad all the matchmakers left are the online kind, not the manipulative older woman…
Those with secrets to keep should avoid this performance. Those with a penchant for private thought should not enter. Liars will be exposed. And spoons, well, spoons and other metal objects should just stay home or suffer the consequences. At least, this is what can be surmised from a description…
Shop in the name of love 8/27 Garages are where useless crap goes to die. Board games with missing pieces. Mismatched coffee mugs. Children’s toys that have long since stopped working. So what, we wonder, spends its golden years in a “gayrage”? Old Cher cassettes? Glow sticks that don’t glow?…
Laughs and riffs in remembrance 8/30 Losing a loved one can be a difficult time, and how we choose to remember the deceased is an important part of the mourning process. When birthdays and anniversaries pass that remind us of those who have died, those days can feel especially painful…
Fastest paws around 8/27 The ancient Mayans were mad scientists. “Mad” primarily as in “mad skillz”– corn didn’t just happen, you know. But there may have been a little derangement in there, too. Why else would anyone contrive that unholy union of dog and bat that is the Chihuahua? The…
Chef’s Treasure Island 8/25 Mullets are of two minds. On the one hand, a mullet is a way of life, a state of mind, a mop of hair that is short on the top, front and sides of the head and long in the back, draping down to the middle…
Some art-house programmer would be wise to schedule a double bill of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s talkumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow’s near-brilliant movie about a grown-up geek who simply lost interest in trying to get laid. Both offer countless giddy variations…
