Arts District takes it to the streets 6/10 You’d better watch out, Dallas. Keep up this annual CityArts Celebration, and some people might mistake you for a real city–you know, the kind that has streets that bustle even when it’s not between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays,…
Shattered clays, twirling tutus 6/11 We’ve heard of shotgun weddings, but shotgun ballet? Why not? It’s for a good cause. Pack some heat and your checkbook to help raise funds for the Texas Ballet Theater by shooting sporting clays (think golf with a shotgun) at the Dallas Gun Club on…
Tour rooms with a view 6/11 Are you still waiting for your invitation to a party in one of those high-rises along Turtle Creek just because you’re dying to check out “the most incredible view of downtown”? Stop waiting by your mailbox, because the Dallas Luxury Urban Living Tour will…
Elledanceworks’ Current show 6/9 Once upon a time, I wrote theater reviews. (Once upon an even more distant time, I acted in plays.) This was a comfortable vocation for me; I could tell if a play was good or bad, and I could articulate why. It made me feel powerful,…
Lords of Dogtown is an odd, disorienting commodity–a fictional version of a documentary (Dogtown and Z-Boys) about the birth of skateboarding in 1970s Venice, California, that was written by the man who directed said doc, in which he was a central figure. Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys now serves…
There was no reason to expect much from Cinderella Man, Ron Howard’s biography of boxer James Braddock, who in the summer of 1935 became the most unlikely heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. After all, it’s a true tale whose outcome has been predetermined; surely there could be no…
Kendall Stallings You may have thought that superrealism in painting had entered gracefully into the annals of history long ago, never to be discussed again. Stallings’ paintings are superreal but not in the photographic sense that Richard Estes, Tom Blackwell and Robert Becthle’s work was in the late ’60s and…
The Dinner Party Six guests receive a mysterious invitation to a party in a fancy Paris restaurant. Once they arrive, each is confronted by his or her ex-spouse. But who is responsible for this nervous gathering? And why is the door to the private dining room locked from the outside?…
Neil Simon’s 31st play, The Dinner Party, now at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, skips the meal and serves up a big fat cream puff. It looks delicious, but bite in and there’s just the slightest hint of filling inside an empty shell. This two-act exercise is an airy and utterly…
A white heron pops forth from an opalescent blue sky. The bird’s head, long, curving gullet and lithe body create a moving ergonomic display that is in stark contrast to the ramshackle, ground-hugging landscape of Industrial Boulevard below. Tension heightens as the two travel at once, a diesel semi bustling…
Sometimes the apple falls really, really far from the tree. In the case of my mom and me, I think I landed in a different time zone. Not in all areas, mind you, mostly in regard to pesky life-maintenance tasks like cleaning. You see, she is super-duper clean. At her…
Thursday, June 2 Surely, we cannot be the only people who didn’t love Sideways. It was good, but we’re still buying Boone’s Farm, and we don’t get what’s the big deal about merlot. Shared Housing Center hops on the Sideways bandwagon for its fifth annual Wine Tasting and Treasure Hunt,…
You know Gordon Parks. Or, rather, you know his work. Maybe it’s just that one photo of Muhammad Ali from 1970, with sweat dripping down his exhausted face, but you’ve seen a Gordon Parks photograph. Perhaps it’s just because of a little 1971 flick by the name of, oh, Shaft,…
Saddle up for sculpture 6/4 A great man once said–while floating in a Titanic life preserver in his sybaritic swimming pool–“Don’t dream it; be it.” OK, so his version of “being it” involved an aquatic orgy and resulted in death by beam of pure antimatter. To satisfy a slightly safer…
Pause for paws 6/4 Dog Day Afternoon comes to Plano’s Bob Woodruff Park on Saturday, but don’t expect to see a sweaty Al Pacino and John Cazale–though there may be a subtext involving genital operations, much like the Sidney Lumet movie of the same name. This Dog Day benefits Operation…
Plant it and they will come 6/4 Last spring we planted lantana beside our crooked little pond in the back yard and waited. We had wanted to attract the Gulf Fritillary, which loves the nectar of this particular flowering shrub. On warm and sunny days, we braced ourselves for an…
The Producers is a hit about a failure 6/7 I have a confession: I keep the soundtrack to The Sound of Music in my glove box. When my day is crappy, I turn to track five and belt out “I Have Confidence in Me.” Embarrassing, I know. But it doesn’t…
It’s fair to say that Madagascar, directed by one man who made Antz and another who used to work on Ren & Stimpy, is virtually plot-free–nothing more, really, than a scene or two from The Great Escape cut and pasted into an episode of Survivor. Its threadbare storyline, about four…
Adam Sandler cast as a former pro quarterback–that laughable setup is about the only funny thing about this pointless, witless remake of The Longest Yard, which wasn’t intended to be taken as a comedy in 1974 and won’t be mistaken for one in its latest incarnation. (It was also remade…
A Number Son of a gun, the clones have arrived. Right now they’re only in the living room of a middle-aged dad named Salter (Bruce DuBose). He thought he had one son–maybe two (he’d ordered up a clone of a dead kid decades ago). But suddenly there are three, four,…
Sometimes a retail store is more social institution than Mecca of mammon. In the case of Dallas, there exists a causal relationship: the more mammon in the Mecca, the greater the social institution. Here retail provides ballast for the community in the most abstract ways, by giving it a sense…
You remember him: unnaturally thick hair, tucked-in sport shirt, half-sitting on the front of the desk with a fleshy thigh splayed to the left, the crew-socked calf dangling below. He could be any teacher–that is, until he flubs virtually all historical events and the fact that his pants are not…
