When you walk up the secret staircase at the front of the lobby of the Texas Theatre, you’ll be taken up to a room with a simple, small window and a strange looking safe. This is The Safe Room. At different times throughout the year, it is made to look…
On this week’s , Stephanie defends her Guardians of the Galaxy review against internet trolls who tell her to go suck eggs, and we touch on Scarlett Johansson in Lucy and the excellent James Brown biopic Get on Up. There’s a lot to be had in this one. Enjoy…
It seems we can expect great things from Gavin Delahunty. Just two months into his tenure as the Hoffman Family senior curator of contemporary art, he’s making huge strides to bolster the Dallas Museum of Art’s interest in modern art. One such effort is his curation of an exhibition of…
A new TV show is trying to bring stand-up comedy back to mainstream television in a way that doesn’t pit eager chuckle monkeys against each other in a battle of meaningless challenges that have nothing to do with comedy. Two names who first took to the mic in Dallas’ burgeoning…
At 7 p.m. Friday at Ro2 Art, Erica Felicella invites you tell her all your secrets. Imagine if you had the opportunity to leave some of your worst memories, thoughts, and actions behind. Imagine if you could clear your head and heart by passing along burdens to another vessel and…
Chipping Smooth Immersive theater is not a synonym for participatory theater. So you won’t need to bring a monologue or warm up your vocal chords before attending Chipping Smooth this weekend. In fact, please don’t. It does mean that you will be part of the theatrical experience. You’ll be amidst…
Beware the movie that’s Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is not to have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyric to “Please, Please, Please” speaks, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
It’s little wonder that no theater until Dallas’ Uptown Players has attempted the bio-musical The Boy from Oz in the decade since it closed its run on Broadway. Hugh Jackman won a Tony in that Broadway production, starring as its flamboyant title character, bisexual Australian singer-songwriter-showman Peter Allen. When Jackman’s…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist, a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of a…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
Think about this night at the theater like you would any other one night stand. Except perhaps this time you’ll have wiled away the hours with a lively, charming man you won’t regret in the morning. For years, Rawlins Gilliland was a welcome voice on public radio, telling stories with…
In need of a holiday? Lucky you—because, as the old song goes, life is a cabaret, old chum–and nothing will take you away faster than a singer with a songbook of showstoppers. Also, wine helps. Such is the allure of Cabaret and Cabernet, a decadent escape that doubles as a…
It’s not very often that an artist gets something right on first try. But Hayao Miyazaki may be the exception. Many critics regard his debut film, Nausicaa, to be his masterwork. Certainly, it redefined the possibilities of storytelling in animated films, creating a landscape that was picturesque, with a story…
Immersive theater is not a synonym for participatory theater. So you won’t need to bring a monologue or warm up your vocal chords before attending Chipping Smooth this weekend. In fact, please don’t. It does mean that you will be part of the theatrical experience. You’ll be amidst the performers…
How many plays does it take to call a series of shows a festival? Or is it simply the label that makes it so? Whatever the answer, the words “New Play Festival” always make me pretty happy when I see them on a Dallas playbill. This year, Soul Rep Theatre…
Guardians of the Galaxy is bound to become the movie that you’ll have to see this summer regardless of whether or not you like comic books or you risk becoming the joy-assassin of the season. Director James Gunn, however, may have given a much needed spin on the genre. He…
Blue Moon Men of Kentucky What do folk music and aliens have in common? Well, nothing. At least they didn’t until The History of Future Folk, the movie about two aliens who visit Earth and decide to save the planet because they’ve fallen in love with — among other things…
At this point in the lives of the remaining members of Monty Python, you have to wonder: Is that a bit from the Ministry of Silly Walks he’s doing, or does John Cleese have a touch of lumbago? Oh, it’ll be hilarious either way; it’s just nicer to laugh with…
Stiff Who killed Mickey Blake? That’s exactly what Jeff Swearingen is trying to figure out in his newest play, Stiff. The 2014 Mastermind takes us back to the 1950s, when Broadway was booming, directors were dreaming big, and critics were the almighty and powerful ones who had the ability to…
The statistics are stunning: according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, almost 240,000 Americans age 12 and older are sexually assaulted each year. This means that someone you know has probably survived such an attack—and has had to pick up the pieces and keep going after it happened…
