The critics heaping raves on Fargo, the new 10-part series on cable’s FX channel, keep describing its lead actress Allison Tolman as “an unknown.” But Dallas theatergoers know her well. She’s that funny, bold performer who starred in plays and musicals at Second Thought Theatre (a company she co-founded with…
It’s everywhere. The horribly catchy Oscar-winning song from the cartoon film that everyone saw except you. Until last year, Disney hadn’t made a movie anyone cared about in over a decade. When Frozen came out, no one could possibly have predicted its quick rise to ubiquity. But now you can’t…
It started as Texas Frightmare Weekend: Three days of horror flicks at the DFW Alamo Drafthouse alongside celebrity appearances by the likes of filmmakers, writers, make-up artists and stars. Then, it grew to an entire week of screenings, panels and opportunities to meet everyone from the original Creature from the…
Usually when awkward phrases like “some sort of Asian,” “Dem titties” and “coat hanger abortions” sneak their way into dinner conversations, it’s a good time to wrap up dessert and start making frantic hand signals to your waiter to bring the check. In the insanely popular card party game Cards…
Golf is an infuriating sport. Prostate exams and unexpected pregnancies are the only two things on this Earth that can draw more curse words from a man’s vocabulary. Soccer looks like it might be exhilarating to play if you can run 10 miles in two hours without wondering if you…
Instead of a bouncer or a box office attendant, you find yourself approaching a psychic. She offers to read your palms and you begin to wonder what kind of night lies ahead. In Andy Baldwin’s vision, The Sophistication of the Oldfashioned will be something in between theater and a speakeasy…
It’s Saturday morning just before 11:30 a.m. and the staff at the Dallas Contemporary is adjusting microphones and setting up chairs for its Chit Chat with Richard Phillips. I dusted off my hangover from Friday night’s champagne-laced gallery hopping, because I felt I owed it to Phillips to show up…
A Saturday Night Live cast member who Rolling Stone called the show’s “secret weapon” is on the docket to do a one-night only show at the Addison Improv…
“April is the cruelest month,” TS Eliot penned to open his poetic triumph, The Wasteland. Poets have written at length about this month filled with spring showers and a sense of renewal. Odgen Nash exhorted readers to marry an April girl; Robert Frost described the days of April as blue…
The hooks slip in to your skin, like a fish caught on a line. Each hook aligned with a particular area of your body to keep a secure grasp on you without ripping out flesh. It takes years to get it right. It takes a practiced hand and a knowledgeable…
I am not an art collector. If I could afford it, I suppose I would be, but at this point in my life I cannot claim it as a hobby. But as an arts journalist, I find myself staring at the price tag of a piece at a gallery scheming…
This morning in the foyer of the Meyerson Symphony Center, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra revealed plans for a large-scale festival of the arts. In May 2015, Soluna brings together the city’s artistic institutions as the foundation for the festival that will include international artists and commissions of new work…
Two years after the private, rough cut screening of what was then called The Starck Project, which played to a packed theater at the Angelika during DIFF 2012, director Michael Cain is ready to unveil his finished product. The Starck Club debuts this Saturday at Texas Theatre, and although that…
Only in America can you tug the sleeve of your Lyft driver, clear your throat and politely ask him to drive-thru Whataburger for you at 2 a.m. Sure, other countries serve third meal at gyro stands or back alley cafes, but here you don’t even have to leave the car…
Comedian and actor Todd Barry will be in Dallas April 25 at the Sons of Hermann Hall to promote his Louis C.K.-produced “Todd Barry: The Crowd Work Tour.” It won’t be the typical guy-stands-before-crowd-and-tells-jokes show. Instead, it’s complete improv and his main source of material is you, the audience…
If you want to stuff any more into this weekend, you’re going to have to pack it to the point of bursting. There are so many art events, we’re struggling to zip it all together. There are gallery openings, farmer’s markets, festivals, dance show, theater productions, a huge film festival,…
We’re bending over backward and sweating through our yoga pants for you, Dallas. For this list of Dallas’ best karma palaces, Katie Womack and I combined our yogi knowledge and crawled out of child’s pose to try new studios. We downward dogged for days on end to present you with…
The most perfect works of art are those suspended between conception and realization, the ones that seize you up with how great they’re gonna be. (Well, those and Busby Berkeley numbers.) Alejandro Jodorowsky’s daft, daring, surrealist, possibly impossible adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s spice-mining science-fiction novel that later proved unadaptable…
A grave has been freshly dug in the opening shot of director Gareth Evans’ ultra-violent Indonesian flick The Raid 2. It’s a start, but Evans is going to need 400 more. In the first few minutes, Evans dispenses with three-quarters of the survivors of 2012’s The Raid: Redemption, the writer-director’s…
Nocturne begins and ends with death and speaks of little else in between. Don’t let that put you off. The play by Adam Rapp, now running at Second Thought Theatre, announces its mordant theme in the first line uttered by the only character who speaks for nearly two hours. He…
A small show that deserves a bigger audience than it’s getting is Soul of Sam: The Sam Cooke Story, now on at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. Written and directed by Sheran Keyton for her Fort Worth-based DVA Productions, it tells the life story of the 1950s-’60s singer/songwriter known…
The language of the body speaks in haunting tones. For the last 36 years, Dallas Black Dance Theatre has been speaking this language to audiences, pairing professional dancers with a mix of modern, jazz, ethnic and spiritual musical works by nationally and internationally known choreographers. DBDT II features the most…
