Second Thought Theatre artistic directors Kelsey Head and Steven Walters took their sweet time picking shows for the 2013 season at Bryant Hall. But maybe it was worth the wait. This small theater, along with Theatre Nouveau 47 and Fort Worth’s Trinity Shakespeare Festival, made season lineup announcements nearly simultaneously today…
The Dallas Museum of Art has just announced that beginning January 21, 2013 the museum will do away with general admission fees and become free to the public. It’s a bold move and it speaks to Eugene McDermott Director Maxwell Anderson’s longstanding platform of public inclusion and making art available…
The Daily Show with Jon StewartGet More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on FacebookSo. Good. After four great years, Dallas-raised writer/comedian Wyatt Cenac has announced that he’ll be leaving his position as correspondent on The Daily Show. His final report will coincide with the last…
He’s a former ticket scalper, NPR contributing storyteller, author of two books and longstanding editor of Found Magazine. Also, Davy Rothbart delivers the occasional pizza. He’ll be in Dallas tonight (Tuesday) at the Texas Theatre doing what he was born to do: engage an audience of voyeurs with stories from…
While we at the Observer live awestruck by Dallas’ collective creativity, once each year we’re able to celebrate it through direct funding. That time is now. See also: – Last year’s MasterMind winners – 2010’s winners Nominations have opened for our third annual MasterMind Awards — Holy Grail cash grants…
The Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre is a great space for experimentation, and that’s due as much to its design as its creative occupants. Crafted to be fully modular, the area accommodates almost any stage layout one can envision. Like a giant Transformer, it morphs. Removable seating, drop down floors,…
The city of Dallas has said it wants next year’s festivities surrounding the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination to be quiet, understated, and focused on the man, not his death. And they will be, we’re sure. But let’s be real: People are going to capitalize on this, and not just…
Every year Hollywood cranks them out — saccharine remakes of A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life, with minor plot tweaks and overused actors. They’ve ruined the dial, filling it with cinema’s version of re-gifting. Meanwhile, original movies that were great the first few hundred times play on a…
In this week’s Dallas Observer, we chronicle the history of Jack Ruby, All-American Boy, perhaps the best play ever produced by Dallas Theater Center. It’s on a surprisingly short list of American plays that have dealt with the JFK assassination. Among the best: Macbird, a 1967 satire by Barbara Garson,…
Just hours after feasting with their families and posting unnaturally humble Facebook status updates, they venture out. Fueled by an irrational desire for Black Friday bargains, these shoppers pawn their thankful feelings in exchange for discount electronics. This cell phone video shows it happening again as home dude clings to…
Tweens, shut-ins, cat ladies and frustrated housewives too timid for 50 Shade of Grey entered their final throes of Twilight-related delirium last week. Apparently, not all vampires live forever. As fans search for another fantasy franchise to fill the emotional void, the rest of us see simply the end of…
First of all: hope you had a great Turkey Day. Secondly: this photo, by the formidable Justin Terveen, landed in our inbox just in time for the coffee spit-take at the family dinner table. The subject line of the email was, appropriately, “COCK AND BALLS.” Which is not the official…
Every Thursday we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. If you can still walk after stuffing your face full of turkey, mashed potatoes and whatever passes for cranberry dressing in your house, head on over to these shows to laugh off some…
Here’s how lack of attention to detail sucks the funny out of a big musical comedy like Crazy for You, the show packed with Gershwin songs and wedged uncomfortably into Theatre Three. In a scene in the second act, two female characters meet for the first time. They are rivals…
“I can’t think of a more pathetic situation for an actor than to do a film and not connect to it,” Irrfan Khan says. “And I pray to God that I never face that situation.” Khan might not be one of the most prominent stars in Bollywood, especially not when…
A stacked-deck theological inquiry filtered through a Titanic-by-way-of–Slumdog Millionaire narrative, Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone. It’s no shock that Ang Lee brings to his high seas adventure graceful and refined aesthetics devoid of any unique signature or pressing…
Silver Linings Playbook, which stars Bradley Cooper as a manic-depressive man-child attempting to get his life back together after a breakdown, won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and subsequently shot to the top of most Oscar prognosticators’ Best Picture short list. The film’s pre-release…
America has had its national traumas — its Antietams and Pearl Harbors and 9/11s — but what we haven’t faced since the Battle of New Orleans is a proper ground invasion, a shooting war with a foreign occupying army. Rather than accept this as good fortune, the absence of this…
Joe Wright’s dust-blowing new adaptation of Anna Karenina faces a towering mountain of precedent: not only the greatest novel by the man Nabokov called “the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction,” but the whole checkered history of Leo Tolstoy at the movies. A visit to Tolstoy’s imdb.com page gives the…
Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, in front of live TV cameras in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. He shot him again on April 23, 1974, before a live audience on the stage at the Kalita Humphreys Theater. The moment when the paunchy, oily-haired Dallas…
Choosing the right Thanksgiving watering hole is clutch. You’ll want a place that’s busy and has the game on. Otherwise it feels like you’re drinking alone on a holiday. Here’s a little list of spots that are open, showing the Cowboys versus Redskins game and loaded with future friends. Bryan…
While Mom’s at home slaving away, preparing the awesomeness that will be this year’s Thanksgiving feast, we’ve got a surefire way for you to stay out of her hair and build up your appetite for turkey. Wake up early, skip the parade and don your running shoes for the North…
