Comedian Aaron Aryanpur is one of the reasons why Dallas has a comedy scene. He started performing when there was just one comedy club in town, which usually catered to out-of-towner headliners. The rest were coffee shops and bars that had an unoccupied corner and an owner who didn’t mind…
Inevitably when something in pop culture becomes officially popular, there is a rush from production studios and fans to spin it off into as many different forms of media as possible from a series of TV show spinoffs to a Saturday morning cartoon to a supremely sugary breakfast cereal. Welcome…
By Linda Smith Pyotr Tchaikovsky was never a fan of his last opera Iolanta, finished a year before his death in 1893. He felt it repeated themes from his earlier operas, and the plot is simple, especially when compared to other works in the operatic genre. As such, it is…
All painting isn’t an act of theater, but it can be. Which is why the next Prism Co. show sounds as much like a live painting event as it does a play. That’s the wonderful thing about this young, upstart company: They aren’t just stretching the definition of what theater…
Climb aboard the weekend cruise liner. First stop? A busy, fun-filled weekend complete with a film festival, an art festival, an art fair, numerous art exhibitions and events, poetry, music, and many more adventures, weather permitting. You won’t be able to see it all, so pick from our handy dandy…
What did you do over your Easter weekend? Most of you without children probably didn’t even realize it was Easter until you noticed an upsurge in Cadbury Creme Eggs at drug stores and creepy, humanoid rabbits taking over the city (outside of the usual furry convention season, too). Comedian roommates…
Picture with me, for a moment, a hypothetical. You’re nearing the end of your life, a fabulously intellectual life. A life people will want to read about (like I said, this is purely a hypothetical). It’s rapidly becoming apparent that you’re going to have to write about it, since people…
A curiosity: The actor Dick Miller, a rumpled salt, has brightened up countless B-movies by showing up for a scene or two to reel off some exposition or maybe get gutted by a robot. Yet his own movie, the one about his years of B-brightening, the one inviting us to…
The Longest Ride is Nicholas Sparks’ most ambitious novel. Instead of one couple, there are two — and he’s even stretched out of his blond/Southern/Christian comfort zone to make the older pair Jewish. For balance, and for pandering to the powerful conservative audience who made American Sniper a megahit, his…
Many of us bookworms missed out on the whole competitive sports thing. Reading and writing are pretty solitary endeavors. It’s not like you can arrange a fight to the death over character development. All of that stuff is subjective. Right? The folks at Literary Death Match don’t think so. During…
There’s an all-too-brief little window between April and mid-May when the weather is largely our friend (barring occasional thunderstorms), encouraging us to emerge from behind closed doors and rejoice before it tries to kill us again in a few weeks. That’s why you’ve gotta have something pretty special going on…
Not that long ago, Ethan Embry was a thing and Liv Tyler was another thing. Oh, and Renee Zellewegger was a thing that wasn’t even Bridget Jones. Anyway, they all worked in a record store called Empire Records that was about to be bought out by Music Town, basically the…
The beautiful thing about Charles Portis’ True Grit is how it represents so many different things to different people. If you want to think of it as a Bible-inspired tale of revenge and redemption, you can do that. If it’s a celebration of a spunky, feminist heroine, then yup. It…
It’s been almost 40 years since Dallas Black Dance Theatre was founded. Since 1976, Ann Williams has grown a small, community-driven organization into a professional dance company recognized all over the country for its diversity — cultural, artistic and audience. In fact, DBDT was in such high demand it needed…
Shoes. You have, like, a million of them in your closet right now. You have a different pair for every dress imaginable. You wear them every day, even when you don’t want to. Shoes are super important. I mean, where would Cinderella be without her glass slipper? Probably still scrubbing…
As a metaphor for struggle, for searing tension, for societal discomfort and even for a revival, fire is a concept that frequently imbues imagery related to civil rights and race relations in the United States. The Burnin’ is a perfect example of the metaphor played to an extreme: Two nightclubs…
The lore of Texas runs strong in America. Every small town has a story, a history, a legend, a myth. You’ll recognize yourself in a lot of the stories, the characters that make up these places. And in artist Noah Simblist’s creation, you’ll recognize something else as well – a…
Mary (yes, that Mary) is often portrayed as obedient, peaceful and poised, but what happens when we dig deeper? When an author sets out to create a humanized version of our beloved virgin? The result is Irish author Colm Tóibín’s short novel, The Testament of Mary. In it, Tóibín brings…
Somewhere out there in that unreachable plain of existence that Carl Sagan used to talk about on Cosmos when you were too baked to understand what he meant, lies a place where the abnormal is the norm. Three suns rise and fall over the desert landscape. The sheriff has a…
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra presents a varied program sure to please a wide array of listeners: beginning with the DSO premier of renowned American composer Christopher Rouse’s tone poem Iscariot, on to Beethoven’s essential Piano Concerto No. 4 and closing with Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony (No. 3). Suggestive, at varying degrees,…
It’s one of the top art festivals in the nation. It includes more than $4.6 million worth of art, everything from ceramics to jewelry to sculptures to photography and more. It takes up 27 blocks, spanning from the Tarrant County Courthouse to the Fort Worth Convention Center. It’s the Main…
If you’re a fan of Oscar Wilde, you know that he preferred to critique society on his own terms, and those terms generally focused on art, style and delightful turns of phrase, as opposed to deep thematic explorations and clunky metaphors. The Importance of Being Earnest is the best example…
