Arts & Culture

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Rick Steves on Israel, Palestine, and Smoking Pot

By The Mixmaster

By Monica Hinman “People used to say ‘Bon Voyage”, comments Rick Steves at the beginning of our phone conversation. It was a way to express excitement and adventure, instead of “Have a safe trip,” which suggests fear and danger. Why such an ominous farewell? Travel is safer than ever but…

Five Random Arty Things That (Maybe) Deserve Best Ofs

By Lauren Smart

Our Best of Dallas 2014 issue rolls out this week. While we can modestly say it’s the greatest, most comprehensive city guide ever created, Dallas is a pretty big place that’s filled to the brim with best-ness. To cover all the good stuff we might have left out, Mixmaster will…

100 Dallas Creatives: No. 54 Performance Pioneer Katherine Owens

By Caroline Pritchard

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. Katherine Owens has made her mark on Dallas as founder and artistic director of the critically…

Podcast: In The Equalizer, Denzel Kills, Summarizes Hemingway, Kills Again

By The Mixmaster

As Bob McCall in The Equalizer, Denzel Washington plays a regular Joe who turns into an eye-gouging, brain-drilling nightmare for Boston’s Russian mob. At first Washington “toodles about a Home Depot-like store, helping customers, decked out in New Balance shoes and jeans so last-century you’ll be looking for pleats,” writes…

Seven Outdoorsy Ways To Celebrate Summer’s Last Hurrah

By Amy McCarthy

Summer’s over. Well, according to the calendar. For North Texans, the end of summer can be bittersweet. On the one hand, the mercury will finally drop to a tolerable level, but it also means no more days spent by the pool, margaritas in hand. There’s nothing more exciting as a…

Open Stage Fosters Craziness, but Artistic Openness Above All

By The Mixmaster

By Michelle Foster On a suburban corner in Plano, across from a llama farm, Celebration Event Center and Ballroom is home to a bunch of oddballs called Circus Freaks who run Open Stage, a weekly romp of weirdness guaranteed to make you feel things. Tonight’s event is speakeasy-themed. Performers and…

Grub-Eating Boxtrolls Thrive in Moral Grayness

By Amy Nicholson

The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film. If the German Expressionists were skilled at stop-motion animation, they’d have already made it. This is cartoon Caligari, a fable set on a…

Nice Guy Denzel Kills in the Cartoonish Equalizer

By Alan Scherstuhl

Before its regular-Joe hero gets bitten by a radioactive equation and becomes the Equalizer, who’s sort of the Rain Man of puncturing Russian mobsters’ windpipes with corkscrews, Antoine Fuqua’s eye-gouging, brain-drilling, crowd-pleasing latest gives you a reel or two to remember what movies felt like back when they were about…

Hector‘s Simon Pegg Gets the Mitty Treatment

By Amy Nicholson

Simon Pegg has always been more like a cartoon than a real boy. He’s one part Charlie Brown to two parts Tintin, a round-faced runt who can channel both childlike depression and old-fashioned cowlicked pluck. In Pegg’s new film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, director Peter Chelsom simply allows…

Andre Benjamin Is Hendrix, but the Women Make Jimi

By Stephanie Zacharek

Groupie has come to be an ugly word, a misogynist dig that’s used all too casually by men and women alike. A groupie is a woman who doesn’t “do” anything; she gets all of her glamour via her association with a strong man, most often a rock star. How can…

Bods and Monsters: DTC Pumps Rocky Horror

By Elaine Liner

Have you been shivering with antici … pation for a new Rocky Horror Show? That not only does the Time Warp but the Bristol Stomp, a Rockette kick line and maybe a little Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies, but with sequined 20-inch dildos? Dallas Theater Center has opened its season…

Stiffs in Suits Sap Sexiness of Shakespeare Dallas’ Antony and Cleopatra

By Elaine Liner

Shakespeare Dallas’ fall production, Antony and Cleopatra, sports two sexy leads in Daniel Duque-Estrada (who’s also a company member at Dallas Theater Center) and the lush-voiced Joanna Schellenberg. As the Bard’s title characters, they create sizzling chemistry, obvious even from the back of the sprawling Samuell Grand Amphitheater. They speak…

Kitchen Dog’s Thinner than Water Boils Over with Family Angst

By Elaine Liner

Fake rain drips from the ceiling at the end of Thinner than Water, a dreary play by Melissa Ross, directed by Chris Carlos, now on in the smaller of two spaces at Kitchen Dog Theater. Really, the whole two-hour drama is a soggy slog through one family’s shriek-storms. Daddy’s dying…

Bills, Bodies & Pills

By Justin Hunt

While the weather is not quite curl-up-next-to-the-fireplace-with-hot-cider yet, the time is never better to restock your bookshelves with the latest novel by Merritt Tierce. A native Texan and award-winning attendee of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tierce returns to her roots in this release. Entitled Love Me Back, the novel centers…

Staying on Their Toes

By Danielle Georgiou

TITAS has quite the dance season planned for us. First, they gave us MOMIX; now, they are presenting work from one of the world’s most important contemporary choreographers. Those are some big words, I know, but it’s actually true in this case. Donald Byrd and Spectrum Dance Theater have become…

Emmy Award-winning Laughs

By Danny Gallagher

There seems to be a new unwritten rule of comedy that if you want to make an audience laugh, you have to show them that you have enough energy to bounce around the room like a pinball on a meth bender. Comedian Margaret Smith can get twice as many laughs…

Good Morning, Vietnam!

By Jennifer Davis-Lamm

The loss of Robin Williams last month was a shocking one, mostly because it’s hard to imagine someone so electric and effervescent being in so much pain. And never was Williams more…well, Williams than in the 1987 Barry Levinson comedy Good Morning Vietnam. The film remains a powerful testament to…

Delicate, Yet Bristly

By Jonathan Patrick

When an injury forced violinist Hilary Hahn to cancel her upcoming performance at the Meyerson, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra selected Augustin Hadelich to fill her role. While Hahn leaves big shoes to fill, this young, fast-fingered virtuoso certainly has the pedigree required to do just that. Apart from the violinist’s…