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. When it comes to classical dance, most people have a pretty solidified opinion on whether or…
It’s the thick of the summer movie season, the best of times and the worst of times for film buffs. What better place to escape the August doldrums than you’re local cineplex? Well, someplace that isn’t filled to the rafter with screaming kids and annoying teens would be nice. And…
No matter how skilled the storyteller, it can sometimes be hard to tell a story. This task becomes immeasurably more difficult when the teller is expected to fully transform into the character both physically and mentally. To further complicate things, add the fact that your protagonist has a personality that…
Get connected. Go to Mars with some guy named Jon. Reverse roles and play a game. Watch a lizard boy eat a Dorito. Talk about white Russians with Tyler’s mom. All of these things and more will happen at Sundown Collaborative Theatre’s “We’ve Done It Again: A Mixtape,” the group’s…
“60 pulses of storytelling is how we like to describe it,” Artistic Director Dominic D’Andrea says of his One Minute Play Festival (#1MPF), making the fest sound suspiciously like theater for the ADD-addled 21st century. In actuality the #1MPF is anything but. This year Kitchen Dog Theater will play host…
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. Dallas’ thriving theatre scene can be attributed to a number of factors. The city’s investment in…
Dallas is the city everyone wants to leave. Well, artists at least. Most people dream of Los Angeles or New York City, or maybe Chicago. But the widely-belief is that anywhere is better than this city, especially during August. Take Sally Glass, for example, who earned her MFA at UTD…
Meet, Candy Barr. One of the mid-20th century’s most infamous strippers, known for teaching movie stars how to tease, all the while teasing some notorious men herself. She’s the subject of the sexy, funny new play by Ronnie Claire Edwards, Candy Barr’s Last Dance, which previews at Theatre Three this…
Michael Bay loves ‘splosions. His first words were probably “I wanna ‘splode;” he’s the Ricky Bobby of blowing shit up. This isn’t blogger hyperbole either. He’ll often say in interviews that as a child in Los Angeles, his interest in filmmaking dates back to the time he was grounded after…
Amy McCarthy and Jaime-Paul Falcon are Dallas’ foremost experts on traveling around Texas (not together, separately, and by “foremost” we mean they get around a lot). Anyhow, in the interest of making sure you get the most out of your late summer days off they decided to give you the…
In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy and the wind whips his cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is. Gleeson, an…
Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, nonthreatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About) and turn small, French villages topsy-turvy by opening chocolate shops (Chocolat)…
Daniel Radcliffe’s first trip to Comic-Con kicked off like the world’s cuddliest Nuremberg rally. This summer, just minutes after he walked into Hall H, the hangar-sized sardine can of 6,500 people sang him “Happy Birthday.” It was an emotional moment for everyone. “The fact that I was turning 25 slightly…
Before you buy that tiny box turtle in Chinatown, know that it can live for 100 years. Which means that among all the Mad Libs nonsense of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — a comic book-turned-media-phenomenon that’s always half-admitted it’s a goof — at least the teenage part is accurate…
Incompatible fronts collide in director Steven Quale’s weather-horror patience-tester Into the Storm. The first is the summertime yen for righteous kablooey, the dumber the better, exemplified here by drunk galoots hauling ass into a twister on a four-wheeler ATV, tossing beer cans and whooping about getting a “million YouTube hits.”…
Star presence, that distillation of charisma and sometimes glamour, lies at the heart of the movies’ appeal. The star presence James Harvey evokes so richly in his new book, Watching Them Be, is never simply about physical beauty. Harvey rightly points out that Ingrid Bergman’s fresh unaffectedness was distinctly unglamorous,…
In the highly imperfect world of contemporary romantic comedies, What If is as close to perfect as anything we’ve got, not least for the way it captures the abject hopefulness of young people who’d like to be in love but don’t know how to go about it. Who does know…
What’s that screwy motto for the City of Dallas? “Live Large, Think Big” or did they change it to “Big Things Happen Here?” It seems we’re hellbent on letting the outside world know that Dallas is a big city that does, well, big things. But big is such a broad…
Even those of us who loved Robin Williams as a performer would have to say that sometimes he was too much — too wired, too pleading, too on. There were times when I’d see him nattering away on a late-night talk show, or suffer through a performance like the one…
Like a fine wine and a good cheese, no one complains about pairing art and music. What could be better than wiling the hot summer hours away in an artist’s studio, listening to some jams, and sipping on a cold beer you picked up from the corner store. Sound like…
For the past few years the Oak Cliff Cultural Center has been working hard providing outreach and education programs for Oak Cliff residents and neighbors. The staff at the Cultural Center provides a wide array of activities intended to foster community engagement and it’s time to celebrate their hard work…
Sure, Dallas might be at a disadvantage without easy access to the coasts, but it’s smack dab between Los Angeles and New York, which for this weekend proves lucky. A two-part exhibition, Lifetime Personal Fantasies, LLC, features the work of LA-based artist Keith J. Varadi and NY-based Michael Kennedy Costa…
