Dan Flavin: A Retrospective Known as a Minimalist artist and a purveyor of its aesthetic of economy and industry, Dan Flavin shows himself to be something different in this retrospective. He is a master of drawing, though not in the conventional sense of the term. Instead of delineating lines on…
Den of Thieves Shane Arts Theatrical Ensemble Rep is the name of the acting company at the new Dallas Hub Theater in Deep Ellum. This is their first production in the 11,000-square-foot space, and if they don’t get a whole lot better, it may be their last. Stephen Adly Guirgis’…
Muscular young men rolling around on each other in skintight unitards sounds like a scene from one of the Uptown Players’ sellout shows. But the intensely though probably unintentionally (let’s hope) homoerotic drama The Wrestling Season is onstage at Dallas Children’s Theater, which is presenting Laurie Brooks’ gay-themed one-act as…
Chocolate has some powerful aficionados. The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, co-creator of the universe and all death and rebirth, was such a superfan that he carried along a cacao tree when traveling from Paradise to Earth on his Morning Star beam. Willy Wonka and his army of Oompa Loompas could transform…
Thursday, May 12 There’s a different way of doing things in the South. After all, where else can you still find hoop skirts at a debutante ball, have Grandma stare you down when you say you like white bread dressing better than the cornbread variety and be able to crown…
Communism and feminism went hand in hand, like, say, George W. Bush and porn star-turned-sexual activist Annie Sprinkle frolicking, hands clasped, through a meadow of wild flowers–but with fewer phony, for-the-television-cameras smiles and a lot more bloodshed. Despite that, author Anchee Min has made a career of looking back on…
Once upon a time at Texas Discovery Gardens… 5/15 One of Mom’s childhood nicknames for me was “Peter Rabbit,” from Beatrix Potter’s children’s tale, which I hadn’t read until today. It has this cheery line: “Now, my dears,” said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, “you may go into the fields…
Fairly dark tales 5/14 By now, some high school or college English or history teacher probably broke the news to you that the sweet old childhood nursery rhyme “Ring around the rosy/Pockets full of posies/Ashes, ashes/We all fall down” was actually about the Black Death. While we thought we were…
More than kung fu and lo mein 5/14 The United States owes a great deal to Asia–literally. Asian central banks hold more than a trillion dollars’ worth of U.S. government IOUs. Jobs have surpassed grain as our chief export to Asia while we ease our pain with pad Thai and…
Two musicians tickle the ivories and change their lives 5/12 Every time we see a new child prodigy on 60 Minutes, we’re forced to ask the question: Is it better to burn out or fade away? Because, undoubtedly, one of those is the fate of 95 percent of prodigies (a…
Much of Crash, an L.A.-stories portmanteau about the suffocating embrace of racism, is hard to watch, harder still to listen to. Its characters–the creations of co-writer and director Paul Haggis but also of people who live next door and perhaps even inside of you–say and do things they shouldn’t. Theirs…
Whatever you do, don’t accuse Ridley Scott of turning his back on a fight. Doesn’t matter if it’s slimy-fanged space aliens attacking Sigourney Weaver, Roman slaves in tough against hungry lions down at the Coliseum or American GIs going at it with Somali insurgents. Sir Ridley is always happy to…
David Smith: Drawing and Sculpting This old master is made new again by way of creative juxtaposition. In placing Smith’s delicate sketches and paintings next to the hurly-burly of his sculpture, the Nasher transforms the sculptor into a figure deeper in cognition and more complicated in process and approach to…
The Beauty Queen of Leenane Three student actors and one veteran take on Martin McDonagh’s gothic Irish tale of Maureen Folan, a 40-year-old virgin (Julie Painter) stuck in a dead-end life caring for her aging mum (Carolyn Wickwire) in their run-down Galway cottage. When she meets Pato, a handsome neighbor…
Mothers really take it in the aprons this week. In two new productions–the regional premiere of campy comedy Mambo Italiano at the Uptown Players and Quad C’s poignant The Beauty Queen of Leenane–they remember Mama not with flowers but with bouquets of blame. Mambo dances the tarantella on its two…
The sculptor David Smith once declared that “the truly creative artist deals with vulgarity.” In that statement of heroic debasement, one hears Smith’s booming, stentorian voice summoning forth a new age of epic abstract form at midcentury. His words were spoken on the defensive and fired at a Massachusetts audience…
Legos seem to inspire something extremely clever and a little obsessive in certain people. These guys are the MacGyvers of the Lego world–you give them a bucket of plastic bricks, they create the Romanov summer palace of Djulber, complete with little lost princess Anastasia and an advancing counterrevolutionary battalion. Nowhere…
Thursday, May 5 We’re certain this week will be the best one of the entire season of the Dallas Arboretum’s summer concert series by the lake called Cool Thursdays. We’re not saying Naked Lunch: A Steely Dan Tribute Band is better than Vince Vance and the Valiants or Voodoo Blue:…
Someone once told us that rather than shop for jewelry, or any girlie thing for that matter, he’d take on the challenge of making sure Mom was technologically advanced instead–DVDs, digital cameras, you get the idea. The whole gift-buying thing befuddled him, and he had to somehow relate what he…
Janis Joplin’s art will go on 5/5 In the 2003 film Festival Express, which chronicles a five-day concert tour through Canada in 1970, Janis Joplin fills just a small portion of the footage, yet she is one of the most memorable elements of the documentary. Not surprising, really–not for a…
Dallasaurs get moving 5/7 Work off those unwanted winter pounds stomping through the wilds of Fair Park during Dino Dash’s 10K, 5K or 1K fun run/walk. Or if you’re already sleek as a raptor and don’t want to sweat, donate Dino Dollars to help The Science Place in Fair Park…
After School’s in session 5/6 When ABC’s After School Specials went off the air in 1988, I was crushed. The shows were riveting: What calamitous, life-shattering disaster would bend the plot this time? And which celebrity would I see pulling bong hits or snorting angel dust and leaping out a…
