Most of the shows on this list require little to no explanation. You’ve likely seen A Christmas Carol before, but the holidays return every year and with it, the same shows, the same music, and the same garland your mother’s been hanging on the bannister for 30 years. So Scrooge…
If you’re reading this, you’re invited to an art party. Artopia 2015 is just around the corner. Tickets for the general public won’t be released until Friday, but as a reader of this blog you have access to the pre-sale tickets which arrive today. At 10 a.m. today ticket sales…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. When Matt Tolentino was eight years old, and most of his peers were shooting each other with Nerf guns, he was writing a strongly worded letter to then mayor Ron Kirk. Tolentino had visited the…
It’s a simple conceit. You can almost hear the artist thinking it to herself: I’ll wear my mother’s dresses. Entering Cydonia Gallery’s new exhibition by Mexican artist Julieta Aguinaco, The Depth of Now, I found myself jealous. At least her mom kept hers. My mother forever interested in discarding. Yearbook…
Now that cold weather has finally arrived, we’re officially moving full-throttle into the holiday season. Thanksgiving is next week, and that can only mean that Christmas will be here well before you’re ready to deal with all your weird relatives. Still, the holiday season can be pretty magical, especially when…
BY INKOO KANG Minor spoilers for the second episode of The Comeback’s sophomore season. It’s no mystery why The Comeback, which returned for its second season this past Sunday after a nine-year hiatus, never became a big hit for HBO. Other mockumentaries like The Office, Parks and Recreation and Modern…
One of the biggest regrets of this comedy nerd’s life was not taking the opportunity to see The Second City during my only two visits to Chicago. The first missed opportunity took place during a Boy Scout trip when landmarks like the Museum of Science and Industry and Comiskey Park…
In the second act of The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, our protagonist, Annie, realizes that her fairy godmother is a blue-haired prostitute. Studying abroad in her native country, the American-raised Annie doesn’t believe in evil eyes, and she doesn’t believe in witches. Which is a shame, because she might…
Wails, bellows, purrs, barks, hisses, laughter, gurgles, screeches, yelps, retching, squeals, gurgles, screams, grunts and groans. No words. Just clusters of prickly, spindly instrumental spattering, and the human voice reduced to animalistic expression. If John Cage had aimed his sights at prepared vocal chords instead of pianos, this is what…
Bad girls of Dallas: There’s a TV show out there for you and now is your time! This show isn’t what you think it is. This show is called Bad Girls Club and…what? Why are you rolling your eyes? OK, so yeah, this TV show is basically seven girls living…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. In years past, the Dallas-Fort Worth theater scene was in desperate need of diversity. In response to largely wealthy-and-white theaters, smaller niche companies began filling in the gaps with a varied and diverse slate of…
Enrollment is now open for the Dallas Observer’s Fifth Annual MasterMind Awards…
This year, the oppressive Texas summer decided to stick around well into November. The temperatures have been high, but this week, we’ve skipped right from summer to winter. During the six preceding months, it hasn’t exactly been easy for Dallasites to do outdoorsy things without worrying about losing half of…
At Undermain Theatre, a new play puts a kickass spin on folklore. In Los Angeles-based playwright Meg Miroshnik’s The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls an American woman returns to her home country, Russia, to study abroad. Upon arrival, the story takes an absurdist twist and the young girl quickly realizes…
Tales of fame and its trappings — and the way they’re never enough to build a life — are as old as show business itself. Maybe for that reason, almost any story about discovering the hollowness of fame is often written off as a cliché. But what’s the difference, really,…
If the universe is infinitely finite, an entity whose mystery is knowable only through an evolving progression of theories and equations, it’s nothing compared to a marriage. Every marriage or long-term partnership is knowable only to the people inside it — and sometimes not even then. The Theory of Everything…
What if you knew the truth but refused to believe it, even if denial meant certain death? Kitchen Dog Theater’s latest production, the regional premiere of Swiss playwright Max Frisch’s prescient 1958 absurdist comedy The Arsonists, sparks a low flame under that question and lets it sizzle for a couple…
During a 2009 Daily Show interview with Maziar Bahari, the Canadian-Iranian journalist who, earlier that year, had been imprisoned in Iran for 118 days on espionage charges, Jon Stewart said, “We hear a lot about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil.” Or about its…
Citizenfour opens at the Angelika on November 21. With the first two documentaries in her post–9-11 trilogy — My Country, My Country, a portrait of Iraq under American occupation, and The Oath, which focused on two Guantánamo Bay prisoners — Laura Poitras seemed to be making a bid for the…
In the mid 1990s, self-appointed cultural gatekeepers used to wield Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber as proof of the deterioration of film artistry. Those people hadn’t, of course, actually bothered to see the movie, and thus had no sense of its peculiar, sweet-spirited, un-toilet-trained brilliance. Times have changed,…
Take notice Dallas avant-garde fans, we don’t get chances like this very often. Aventures and its slightly more structured “sequel” Nouvelles Aventures are amongst Gyorgy Ligeti’s most fascinating works. Composed for three singers and instrumental septet, these miniature anti-operas (what the composer termed “mimodramas”) are equal parts haunting, hilarious, and…
Have you ever thought to yourself, “Gee, these all-you-can-eat pancakes sure are tasty. But you know what would make them even better? A cash bar, art by over 50 emerging artists and live body painting demonstrations.” Yeah, I didn’t think so. But some weirdo genius did, and they turned that…
