On his 60th birthday, astronomy professor Ansel Barber sits on his roof, staring through a telescope at the heavens. One by one, his family and friends crawl out a dormer window and bring him down to earth for a night of dark revelry and confrontation in the new musical Soft…
This year, Sundance started a week late to bypass Martin Luther King Day. Perhaps that’s why buyers bid on films like sprinters racing after lost time. Thanks to their spending spree, every movie on this list should eventually make it to a theater near you — or at least to…
After five years of development, with workshops here and in New York City, Will Power’s musical Stagger Lee finally has its world premiere at Dallas Theater Center. With all that time and effort behind it, Power, who is DTC’s Mellon Foundation-funded playwright-in-residence and the Meadows Prize resident writer at SMU’s…
February’s dance round-up includes a performance from one of the most famous and notable American choreographers, the mounting of a classic, yet contemporary ballet, a performance art series that features dance, a Valentine’s Day event for you dance movie lovers, a concert that celebrates a historic month, a concert that…
It’s hard to explain what America was submitted to viewing on TV last night. But here at the Mixmaster we will try our best. Carly, Arlington woman/cruise ship singer/Bachelor contestant, was chosen for a one-on-one date with the Bachelor, Prince Farming Chris Soules. Host Chris Harrison delivered the date card…
Chocolates and diamonds are played out, people. It’s 2015, which means that you’re no longer allowed to fall back on your boring laurels. It’s easy to go to whatever grocery store is closest to you and pick up an only semi-wilted bouquet of flowers, but your main squeeze would probably…
We hadn’t been inside the American Airlines Center for five minutes when the marketing machine snared my six-year-old nephew in their trap of flashing lights, loud noises and wallet-depleting merchandise. And, with a deep sigh of resignation I accepted that I wasn’t getting out of this one, as every parent,…
Thanks to the woeful state of arts education in this country, many of us are entirely unaware of the thriving arts scene that exists around us. There is theatre, dance, art and music every night in this city, but buying tickets to all those concerts and exhibits adds up quickly…
The opera will always be operatic. This may seem a redundant, or obvious thing to write, but this can be the paramount struggle for a contemporary audience member. If you didn’t grow up on staples like Madame Butterfly or Carmen — and who really does anymore? — it’s unlikely you’ll…
Back in 2007, the late writer and thinker Christopher Hitchens caught a forklift load of flak for writing a story in Vanity Fair titled simply “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” He reasoned that men were funnier and more clever in comedy than women thanks to a trait guys picked up in…
Just like Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror and The LEGO Movie, the podcast series Serial became one of those pop culture moments that everyone you knew ordered you to consume. Everyone on social media ate up your precious bandwidth with their thoughts and feelings on the latest, surprising details to come…
It’s Wednesday night in Frisco, and I’m standing inside a giant, white, big-top tent, double fisting champagne before seeing what was described to me as “Game of Thrones” meets “Cirque du Soleil” with 63 horses. As it turns out, Odysseo by Cavalia is nothing like “Game of Thrones,” and only…
I was out of town for the first weekend of Dallas Medianale, then busy with Artopia for the next event. There are a lot of excuses for not showing up to things. But this week I’ve been resigned to catch up with this inaugural experimental video art event. And boy…
This weekend you can fill your life with prancing ponies, the world premiere of a new musical, acrobatic CATS that play guitar, art exhibitions, and Mozart. And you can do all of that before the Super Bowl on Sunday — or during it, if you’re so inclined. Get planning, slackers…
Halfway through Laura Gabbert’s documentary City of Gold, a salute to Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize–winning food critic’s brother Mark reveals a dark family secret: Gold grew up devouring iceberg lettuce and orange Jell-O. Every day, we eat. It’s a must. And those meals tell a story: The peanut sauce…
These days, classical music is necessarily an acquired taste. Unless you study music, you’re probably not exposed to it much. The songs that dominate the charts are manufactured like Doritos: They’re small bites of sound engineered to stimulate pleasure centers but also to be bland and forgettable, so they can…
In 2013, we profiled 3D printing company Captured Dimensions, a Richardson-based company whose goal is to provide people with a futuristic way of making memories. And their technology has only gotten better. Now, the company uses more than 80 DSLR cameras arranged in a 360 degree array to take a…
Jude Law, once so shiny-penny-clean and pretty — and with the kind of chin dimple that might have inspired Audrey Hepburn to ask, as she did of Cary Grant in Charade, “How do you shave in there?” — is only now reaching the age where we can call his face…
No matter how you end up feeling about it, there sure is a lot of movie in Mommy, Xavier Dolan’s exuberant melodrama about an emotional firecracker of a teenager who, after being kicked out of a specialized school for setting the cafeteria on fire, goes home to live with his…
There are few hard-and-fast rules in screenwriting, but here’s one I think we can agree on: Something’s gone wrong if your crowd-pleasing family drama asks audiences to hope a child’s father proves to be a crackhead. That’s one baffling turn in Mike Binder’s Black or White, a movie about race…
Who says award-season winners have to be epic? If you’re looking for an alternative to the lengthy features vying for recognition and box-office glory, ShortsHD and Magnolia Pictures have on offer the full slate of 2014 Oscar-nominated short films. Divided into three categories (documentary, animation, live action), each featuring five…
Look, if it’s going to have any chance of stirring in us that warm, giddy, life-saving thrill of love actually working out, a romantic comedy with a happy ending probably has to cheat a little bit, to inflate its obstacles, to make those final moments truly momentous. To honor that…
