Misery Annie Wilkes loves the company of Paul Sheldon, the author of her favorite romance novels. Loves it a little too much. After nursing Paul’s car wreck injuries in her remote mountain home, Annie holds him hostage until he types a new novel tying up loose ends for her beloved…
Jesus got his own Broadway musical, as did Joseph and the entire Gospel of Matthew. Now, Job’s not one to complain, but while his biblical compatriots are busy being superstars with amazing Technicolor dreamcoats who are godspelling all over the place, Job just wonders when his tragically sad story will…
Thursday, July 14 In the 1950s, real men could sing and dance. Real men appeared in musicals about saving inns for their former bosses by performing revues. And they even got the girls before the credits rolled. Danny Kaye was a real man–a funny man–who cracked the jokes while straight…
Like a playground bully, Etta James’ voice will knock you down and steal your lunch money. But this time you’ll like it. When James pleads for you to “Tell Mama all about it,” you’ll do it. When she asks anyone who’ll listen to “Stop the Wedding,” you’ll scramble toward the…
Hogwarts is back in session 7/15 Call us nerdy. We don’t care. Make annoying comments in the style of a fellow staffer whose name rhymes with Shablonsky: “You read that shit? Um, hello, you’re an adult.” Yeah, so what? We’re nerds, we’re bookworms and we’re obsessed with a particular strain…
Spikefest has balls 7/16 If there’s one thing there’s not enough of in North Texas, it’s large groups of sweaty, suntanned athletic bodies bumping balls alongside each other for hours at a time in broad daylight. But the good people of Frisco are enlightened, and they’re actually kind of into…
Club Che is revolting 7/14 Revolution is a dodgy subject. It can serve the freedom of society and thought or the re-establishment of terror and fringe fanaticism. Whether old guard or new order, revolution is exciting, interesting and sexy. And it’s essential to our progression–or at least necessary in terms…
Homeless theater companies find shelter 7/14 When he wasn’t busy musing on neurotic anxiety, ego suppression and repressed traumas, Sigmund Freud was a theater buff. He wasn’t so much a red carpet kind of fan as much as a red editing pen kind. He loved to pick characters apart and…
Movies based on comic books have become dime-a-dozen events–appropriate given the cover price of these titles was 10 cents when they debuted decades ago. It wasn’t so long ago Warner Bros. teased the release of Richard Donner’s Superman by insisting, “You’ll believe a man can fly”; now, you’ll not only…
The British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992 that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip…
Concentrations 47: Jim Lambie Jim Lambie has recalibrated the architecture of the Dallas Museum of Art, sheathing the floors of the museum’s main corridor with multicolored tape in an installation work called “Zobop.” Lambie has transformed the blasé postmodern interiors of our local hall of culture into a funhouse for…
The Hypochondriac Molière’s 350-year-old comedy about a man who imagines he’s at death’s door closes out the second season for Classical Acting Company. The wickedly spindly Chamblee Ferguson plays Argan, the wealthy tightwad obsessed with loosening his bowels and tightening his control on a lovesick daughter. He wants her to…
I may be a reality TV junkie, but even I have standards. I require my reality programs to have a life-improving goal (such as America’s Next Top Model’s modeling contract or Project Runway’s mentorship and clothing line), or they must involve celebrities–preferably engaged in a life-affirming challenge (Celebrity Fit Club)…
Thursday, July 7 Strange phenomena of ordinary life: Our cat will chase her tail only when perched precariously on the bathtub edge or the back of a recliner. We hit traffic or construction on Interstate 35 only when we’re running late already and planning to blame it on traffic or…
In his new book Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, his sequel to If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, Bruce Campbell recounts his finally landing a significant role in an A-list project. All those years of being drenched in Karo syrup in direct-to-Beta productions (Assault on Dome…
And so are other foods, bands and events 7/8 A question for our times: What is the taste of Dallas? Is it asphalt and burned rubber? Sunblock and hairspray? We could spend ages pondering this question, but for our purposes here, the Taste of Dallas is one thing–an annual community…
Cyclists make a pit stop in Weatherford 7/9 The last organized bicycle ride I took part in–about a dozen years and 30 pounds ago–was in Indiana. Hardy people, those Hoosiers. Stoic Midwestern stock. Which is a polite way of saying they ran the ride like the Marine Corps’ Parris Island:…
They won’t, but maybe the art will 7/9 Art in Dallas. If you don’t know where to look, or if you’re standing in my father’s living room, you would think it was all mounted white-tail bucks, sepia-toned bronco pics and the odd Remington sculpture. Gray Matters Gallery is different. Vance…
To tutu or not to tutu 7/8 World-famous choreographer Martha Graham once described dance as “the hidden language of the soul” and our bodies as “sacred garments” that “say what words cannot.” Well, in that case, let’s just say that if you put my body in a tutu or a…
Gregg Araki likes to shock. That’s no secret to anyone who has followed the director’s career, but a cartoonish layer of unreality has usually kept the polymorphous sexual pairings and graphic violence somewhat at a distance. There’s a little bit of that in Mysterious Skin, but mostly it stays grounded…
Quite simply and quite literally, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is Close Encounters of the Third Kind turned inside out: We’re still not alone, only this time the aliens are out for our blood, which they spray all over the countryside like so much red…
What must go on offstage at Disney’s On the Record? Eight singers and nine musicians populate this sickeningly cheerful revue of more than 60 songs plucked from 75 years of movies from the mouse factory. Now playing at the Music Hall at Fair Park, the touring production already has crisscrossed…
