New York–It’s not unusual that most of us find great comfort maneuvering in the vernacular. Whether spoken or architectural, the vernacular is familiar, easy, efficient and, at its base, local. It’s the slang that gets your order across to the waiter. It’s the back road that gets you fastest from…
Skid Row never looked so clean. Every ugly, filthy, creepy, scary detail of the original film it was based on has been scrubbed away in the oversized touring production of Little Shop of Horrors now going through its motions at the Music Hall at Fair Park. This version of the…
The Exit The new Labyrinth Theatre company debuts with Kevin Ash’s dramatic two-act answer to Sartre’s existential classic, No Exit. This time, writes Ash, there’s a way out of hell. Trapped together in a hotel room decorated in nauseating colors (and sans mirrors, beds or air-conditioning), three characters–a sweaty fat…
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas This show should be called “Dallas Collects Ellsworth Kelly.” It would be more honest, not to mention more intriguing. This dainty collection of top-quality painting and sculpture by the mid-20th-century artist does little service to the importance of Kelly. Kelly’s brightly colored and experimentally shaped opaque…
Photographer, multimedia artist and fervent peace activist Laray Polk stirred up controversy several years ago over a nude piece in a Dallas-area arts center. Now she tries to ruffle more feathers with the opening of her latest artistic venture, Gaza Zoo. The name harks back to the day in May…
Thursday, August 19 We’re so despondent over the death of chef Julia Child that we’ve vowed to drink heavily and never cook again. All right, so those aren’t exactly new resolutions, but the passing of “The French Chef” has given them new meaning. Maybe it’s not as fitting a tribute…
Dorm rooms were forever changed in 1999. Another option was added to the poster selections. Joining Travis Bickle’s Mohawk and blood spatters, the menacing line of Mr. Pink/White/Blonde, etc. and Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield’s brandished pistols was Brad Pitt’s fashionable Tyler Durden with a fistful of rendered human fat…
8/20 Listen up, Dallas, to some ugly truth: You’re fat. Not stout. Not pleasingly plump. Not big boned, but F-A-T, as in two-by-four, can’t get through the kitchen door. Men’s Fitness says so, ranking Dallas No. 3 on its list of the fattest cities in the nation. Even the mayor,…
8/20 As if it weren’t already hot enough in August, Highland Village has to prove that its air is hotter than everybody else’s air by throwing a hot air balloon festival. Yeah, that’s what happens when you chop down all the shady trees and throw down tons of black asphalt…
8/23 The “block parties” we remember from childhood involved myriad containers of green bean casserole, a teetering portable basketball hoop with no net and oft-shirtless men milling around Dad’s deer feeder inspecting the welded joints. Generally, the moms would discuss the infidelities of some PTA member while pushing around weird…
8/20 We’re not big on crying. For one, it’s not becoming. Swollen eyelids and a snotty nose? No thanks. But there was a time when tears came more easily for us. Say, 1989 or so, when we were 13 and a whole lot less jaded, and when Steel Magnolias was…
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song–the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted; it doesn’t matter. All that counts is that the person…
Garry Marshall is at it again. The director of Pretty Woman, Beaches and the original Princess Diaries has returned to peddle his particular brand of überschmaltz in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, in which he disguises an insidious worship of wealth and privilege as a “feel-good” comedy about a…
Pierre Huyghe: One Million + Kingdoms Pierre Huyghe (pronounced “Weeg”) is an artist who’s in touch with the power of mass media–both as it molds our collective identity and as fodder for making good art. The three videos now showing at the Fort Worth Modern confront the manner in which…
Anton in Show Business Take three actresses of varying ages and levels of talent. Put them in a no-money production of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters on a toilet-sized stage in San Antonio. Then let the angst begin. In this comedy by the pseudonymous Louisville playwright Jane Martin, the play-within-the-play…
“The American theater’s in a shitload of trouble,” the “stage manager” says to the audience in Anton in Show Business, Jane Martin’s roundhouse punch at the absurdity of the acting profession. That may be true, but the funny thing is, by choosing this dark, smart satire as its season opener,…
Have you heard the one about helping little old ladies across the street? No, of course, you haven’t. That’s because comedy and kindness rarely go hand in hand. There are no funny jokes about spending Christmas serving mashed potatoes at a soup kitchen. “Altruism” and “philanthropy” are words that would…
Thursday, August 12 A letter circa the late ’70s (some content altered for improved readability): Dear Rodgers & Hammerstein, Thank you. I was really discouraged about my spelling, but thanks to the rousing “Oklahoma!” I am able to spell the state’s name aloud and with a damn catchy melody. I…
Mothers are the worst people in the world. Sure, some moms aren’t so bad, like the ones on Jerry Springer or the mother of JonBenet Ramsey, but they pale in comparison to mothers who don’t throw their kids’ comics in the trash. See, in our youth, we built up a…
8/16 He was the first-born son of Ewell and Lena Holston Pope, small and imaginative but racked from an early age with diphtheria that spread from his skin to his throat. And as he lay dying, Lena asked her son Conrad what she would do without him. Conrad took a…
8/14 There are those who believe that Elvis Presley did not, in fact, die on August 16, 1977. These are the people who decorate their houses (trailer or otherwise) with velvet paintings of the once and future King. They’ve seen Graceland more often than they’ve seen their in-laws’ home, and…
8/16 We echo the Pulp Fiction-engendered disgust of the idea of Dutch people slathering french fries in mayonnaise. And, unlike our father, we have never been inclined to drown our pinto beans in ketchup; nor will we allow Tabasco sauce to touch any food we plan on consuming. The simple…
