thursday february 15 Molka Alexandrova and Sasha Botcharova: Third Planet Theatre is a Dallas-based performing-arts company that specializes in importing Russian and other international talent as part of a post-communist, good-faith project. Its latest care package to the arts-loving Dallas population is a pair of singer-actor-dancer-comics who promise to deliver…
“I’ll tell you something,” Bob Musgrave whispers while standing in Goff’s Hamburgers, a curiously highbrow dive off the Tollway. “Back in the ’70s, the owner, Harvey Goff, used to keep this side door to the restaurant open, and every once in a while, he’d shoot a .38 slug into a…
Here we are again. It’s time for the 1996 Drive-In Academy Award nominees. I know you’re thrilled. The coveted Hubbie will be awarded in early April, and once again there are no duplications between the Hubbies and those other Academy Awards that they give out at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion…
Anthony has spent the last few weeks in a mental hospital. Dignan, Anthony’s best friend, wants to get him out, and has planned an elaborate escape: Anthony ties his bed sheets together, shimmies out the window to his pal waiting below, and together they make a daring, daylight break for…
thursday february 8 Dance Consortium: If you check out a performance by the Richardson-based contemporary dance ensemble Dance Consortium and dance is not a form of entertainment with which you are familiar, here is a word of warning: Arrive early and read the program from cover to cover. Otherwise, you…
For most baby boomers, Tobacco Road was one of those books which, if encountered at all, was found in dad’s dresser drawer buried beneath the boxer shorts and the scented, monogrammed hankies. Its lurid cover–usually a WTV (white trash vixen) in a dirty, strategically decaying dress–made you ponder the mysteries…
To update, or not to update? That is the question facing directors today who wish to stage classic plays. Stay true to a classic’s setting, period, costumes, and text and you risk audience indifference. Revamp a play and set it in South Central Los Angeles or on a futuristic space…
Every actor wants to be a drunk, and every actress wants to be a hooker. I don’t know why exactly, but I know you can take the straightest white-bread suburban nerd out of an acting class and say, “Hey, how would you like to play a crack-addicted serial killer?” and…
When the new Ridley Scott film, White Squall, really gets rolling, it lives up to the energetic image of its title. The sea rages on like some great, angry ogre of wind and water as a schooner–a floating Outward Bound high school called the Albatross–is mercilessly batted about by a…
“Oscar-caliber” is the kind of backhanded cliche that film critics dole out at year’s end like gruel at a soup kitchen. (Critics hope to guilt Academy voters into seeing things their way or suffering the consequences–whatever those might be.) The plaudit, so overused to begin with, is faint praise at…
thursday february 1 Perspectives: A Concert of Electroacoustic Music: When Jerry Garcia died last year, critics across the country who had never said a kind word about the musical narcotic he and the Grateful Dead created struggled to be kind, or at least respectful. Usually, the memorials emphasized his worldwide…
If Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino aren’t careful, they’ll risk overstaying their critical welcome even before they’ve had a chance to get really cozy. Both directors’ careers have followed arcs that quickly intersected: Each directed independent, critically lauded feature debuts (Rodriguez, his $8,000 miracle El Mariachi; Tarantino, the festival-circuit hit…
Ever since Queen of Venus, there’s been something about outer-space women wearing pointy hardware on their chests that just brings out the appreciation of cinema in its purest form. But in Caged Heat 3000, the finest futuristic women-in-cages exploitation movie ever made in Tijuana, Cassandra Leigh does more than just…
The surprisingly strong, sensitively handled feminist themes that run through the films of Chinese director Zhang Yimou have earned him praise around the world and vilification at home. In Ju Dou, a Double Indemnity-style drama set during the 1920s, he told the story of a peasant girl who dared to…
Before Stanley and Blanche and George and Martha, there was Julie and Jean. The leads in Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s gripping psychodrama Miss Julie set the pattern for modern stage couples who take turns ripping great bloody chunks from each other’s psyches. The play is considered a seminal work not…
There are many ways to get nookie at a drive-in, and some of them are legal. But the best way to execute the art of autoerotic suggestion is to pay good money for a flick that has proven to be so irresistible to women that sometimes just the title alone…
There is a moment in the controversial new film, Georgia, which will pretty much decide what you think of the movie and its star, the ever courageous, enigmatic Jennifer Jason Leigh. Actually, there are nine of them. Legendary “actor’s director” Ulu Grosbard (The Subject Was Roses, Straight Time) lets the…
Let’s apply a little Queer Theory to the Harry Hunsacker plays. Before beginning this instructive exercise, however, it’s necessary to explain to the benighted what the Harry Hunsacker plays are. Harry is the bumbling, narcissistic hero of a series of stage whodunits performed at the Pegasus Theater in Deep Ellum…
When critics talk about the great actors of American cinema, their opinions are often based on not upsetting the critical status quo–De Niro is a chameleon, Pacino a sizzling stick of dynamite, yadda yadda yadda. Forget what you’ve been told–compared to Sean Penn, De Niro is an anemic bore who’s…
For a few minutes at the beginning of Mr. Holland’s Opus, it might occur to you that if George Bailey, the Joblike hero played by Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, were a teacher rather than an S&L owner, this film might have been moot. Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss)…
thursday january 18 KNON Benefit: If you haven’t checked out the western swing stylings of Cowboys and Indians, investigate the Dallas Observer Scene, Heard compilation of local artists (next time, we won’t ask so nicely). You’ll find a jaunty little ditty about a happy fat boy called “Roly Poly.” It’s…
The first recorded theatrical performance, according to anthropologists studying Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France, was an audience-participation comedy. Several Cro Magnon hunters reenacted how Og, the tribal fool, was run through the kidney by a woolly rhinoceros during a particularly raucous foraging party. Meanwhile, the audience encouraged the players…
