Chelsea Handler is a unique commodity in the annals of late night. For starters, she’s a woman. As the host of E!’s groundbreaking talk show Chelsea Lately and the author of several New York Times best-selling comedy novels, she’s also pretty damn funny and fearless with the subjects she tackles, whether it’s about the biggest…
It’s hard to say which is more beautiful: George Balanchine’s Serenade set to Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings in C,” or that the inspiration for Balanchine’s choreography was ballet students. Something else to ponder: Is Ben Stevenson’s L, choreographed for 11 male dancers to a percussive soundtrack, a tribute to a certain iconic Minnelli,…
For some artists, the city streets are a canvas. Buildings with blank brick walls beg for the bright colors of a brand new mural. Graffiti artists have been painting Deep Ellum for decades, bringing to life storefronts and back alleys. Jerod DTOX Davies is one such painter, or muralist, as he likes…
If you’re an opera fan, you don’t want to miss this evening of booze and song. The Fort Worth Opera’s popular series Opera Shots returns to the gorgeous outdoor stage at The Foundry in Oak Cliff, 2303 Pittman St. It’s opera in a bar, and it features music by young, talented rising…
If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, maybe it’s because no one knows the forest exists. It might come as a surprise to Dallas residents that the Great Trinity Forest is in their backyard. Well, maybe not your backyard. Yep, those are just…
Most of us were probably still trying to figure out what our majors were going to be and how to hold our liquor when we were 19. Jan Lisiecki, who turned 19 just this week, is already a professional concert pianist with a successful recording and touring career. You can hear…
You’ve always wanted to beat a world record. And if not, you should. Make it happen at the Texas Pinball Festival. At 5 p.m. Friday, you and your fellow pinballers can attempt to shatter the world record for most people playing pinball simultaneously. The current record is 100 people and held by…
If you could live your life like Jay Gatsby, wouldn’t you? The suits, the women, the music, the cars, the parties. Of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest character didn’t live happily ever after, but that was then. This is now. There’s no reason you can’t dress up, pack a picnic,…
She has helped make burlesque a household name again, and now Dita Von Teese brings her show Burlesque: Strip, Strip, Hooray! to the House of Blues. The show will include four performances by Von Teese, featuring her most extravagant props to date, including a Victorian birdcage and a giant art deco-style martini…
New York and Los Angeles are homes to the some of the biggest and most famous late-night TV franchises in the world. They take them for granted and, to be fair, you would too if you lived next door to the Ed Sullivan Theater. You might even find yourself complaining…
The Miss America pageant is a strange amalgam of beauty contest and charity event. All of the contestants are incredible citizens of the world, who dedicate their lives to important causes. Oh, who are we kidding? It’s really all about the looks. The ridiculous nature of beauty pageants has been…
In a perfect world, Disney on Ice would be some nefarious mobster plot to silence stupid Ariel and her anti-female-empowerment nonsense by sending her to Antarctica where she could warble to the icebergs. Sadly for parents, it is actually a nefarious plot by Disney to dive into our wallets and…
In Nocturne, a 17-year-old piano prodigy accidentally decapitates his 9-year-old sister in an auto accident. Mom goes nuts. Dad threatens to shoot son. Son heads off to New York, escapes to books, becomes a writer and struggles to comes to grips with the tragedy. No further word on what happened to…
Explores the international relationships that George W. Bush crafted during his presidency. April 13-June 3, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., 2014…
When it comes to international art exhibitions, Dallas can often be ignored in favor of cities like New York City or Chicago. The Dallas Museum of Art (1717 N. Harwood St.) is changing that with grabs like Jean Paul Gaultier a few years ago and now with its latest exhibit,…
My first swings at arts journalism were articles about Undermain Theatre. A poetry student at Southern Methodist University, I turned my eyes up from my belly button just long enough to attend a few shows and immediately began writing about the exciting new work happening in Deep Ellum’s basement theater…
What is it like to win a Grammy? According to tenor Jay Hunter Morris, the star of The Dallas Opera’s current production of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, “It’s the most crazy, good thing ever!” “I feel like five years ago not a soul on this earth, myself included,…
Spring is here. Fittingly, the weekend’s weather forecast calls for highs of 90 degrees and lows of 45. This means that at theaters across the city, you’ll be battling strange combinations of air conditioning and heat. But that’s no excuse to miss any of the shows on this list. If…
There was a dark period in my life a few years ago when my days consisted of work, classes, writing and not much else, and my nights were packed full of the saddest event known to modern humans: the Internet date. If you’ve never been on a dating website, if…
Indie rock darling The National is the subject of a new film, Mistaken for Strangers, which opens this month at the Texas Theatre. It’s been called a mockumentary, but after seeing it, that’s the last description I’d use…
In addition to presenting high quality renditions of old favorites like Carmen, La bohème or Don Giovanni, great opera companies also take artistic risks by presenting audiences with new or unfamiliar works. The Dallas Opera deserves props for bringing not one, but two rarely performed operas to the stage in…
We categorize art by medium: painting, sculpture, film, dance. You get it. But to what extent is art meant to be defined by medium? Is it paint on a canvas, a series of movements, a marble carving? Or does the intangible idea transcend the brushstrokes? Much like a person’s humanity…
