Sometimes a few orders of well-made appetizers can be as satisfying as a four-course meal. So it is with The Dining Room, now playing at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas. A.R. Gurney’s two-act play offers nibbles of story, several tasty characters and enough good lines to chew on to forgive the…
Cast: Photographs by Jin-Ya Huang In her photographs, Jin-Ya Huang turns fuzziness and blur into a visual vocabulary of the indecipherable. The illegibility of her images is by no means frustrating. The combined result of the artist’s secret prop choices and photo-digital process, these images will keep you guessing while…
6/24 Defining rock and roll’s birthday is nearly impossible. But Memphis staked claim to the date July 5, 1954, the day when a very young Elvis Presley recorded “That’s All Right (Mama)” at Sun Studio. Arguably, others were doing it first. And according to an article by David Hajdu from…
A strong toxin requires a strong antidote. In the case of the Bush administration, the cure is being served in significant part by Michael Moore, who previously delivered the rousing documentaries Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine. This time, however, the exposé feels even more personal, as Moore reveals…
It’s often a challenge to fairly assess a film that, by its very conception, is simply targeted to an entirely different demographic from one’s own. I am not by nature romantic or female; for those who are, it may have to suffice that the mostly double-X-chromosomed crowd watching The Notebook…
It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite–the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess–and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge. Remember that kid who…
Perhaps some day in the distant future, film scholars and academics concerned with race relations will devote papers and lectures and even entire books to Keenen Ivory Wayans’ White Chicks, in which two FBI agents, played by Shawn and Marlon Wayans, don Caucasian masks and impersonate white women in order…
The first words the audience hears in the Richardson Theatre Centre production of the thriller Wait Until Dark come from President Gerald R. Ford, grimly granting Richard M. Nixon a full pardon for involvement in Watergate crimes. It’s a brief audio flashback to 1974, a dark period in American history,…
Wait Until Dark Frederick Knott knew scary. Before he wrote this thriller about a blind girl battling three nasty drug dealers in her own New York apartment, he penned Dial “M” for Murder. Knott was a master of the mystery with a twist, of the finale that turns the tables…
You’ve come to trust Night & Day for news about events that will improve your sense of culture. For that, we’re terribly sorry, because we’re about to recommend something that will drop your cultural standing about, oh, 400 points. On Thursday, Shock Cinema proudly presents Make Them Die Slowly. This…
Thursday, June 24 Jazz is chaos. Jazz is flashing red. Jazz is shocking yellow. Jazz is shadowy blue. It’s colorful, sometimes dark, sometimes vivid and occasionally a well-constructed mess. Romare Bearden’s art is all of that. He grew during the Harlem Renaissance, was raised around family friends Duke Ellington and…
The most insightful thing we’ve heard in a while is, in fact, something we really already knew. But when someone says something out loud, it’s funny how the statement takes on more importance and relevance. Chatting with Clarissa Pierro, lead dance instructor for The Art of Exotic Dancing for Everyday…
6/26 In Longview in 1953, my mom sat in a pink and white Ford Fairlane between her mother and grandmother and had an experience that changed her life. At 9, she was already an avid reader of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. On her lap, a black cocker…
6/26 Back when I taught high school, I spent every other Tuesday supervising an after-school skateboarding club. A handful of 14-year-old boys, you know the type–baggy jeans, black hoodies, in serious need of a sandwich. They scrawled anarchy symbols on their notebooks and plastered “Skateboarding Is Not a Crime” on…
6/28 Dude, Neil Slater is the jazz man testifyin’. He’s written 60 compositions for jazz ensembles, was nominated for a Grammy in ’93, chairs the jazz studies department at the University of North Texas and played piano when the immortal Stan Kenton of the Stan Kenton Orchestra couldn’t. On Monday,…
Behind frenzied and diligent art collecting one usually finds eccentric and extraordinary art collectors. Such idiosyncrasy and the museum go hand in hand as the labyrinthine spaces of yesterday’s collectors often become the public treasuries of today’s moneyed idlers and wandering intelligentsia. One need only look to the John Soane…
The Day After the Fair From an 1891 Thomas Hardy short story comes this moody, romantic little drama about a frustrated West Country housewife, her illiterate maid and the handsome London lawyer who steals both their hearts. The production by Theatre Britain, a local troupe of dedicated Anglophiles, casts Sue…
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…
We participated in our personal Fear Factor today. There were no plates of sheep testicles or coffins full of rats. We didn’t jump from a tall building or climb giant monkey bars far above a body of water. We did, however, pick up a phone and call a clown. And…
Thursday, June 17 Can a photo or drawing of someone else be a self-portrait? Angstrom Gallery’s featured artists, Jack Pierson and Paul P. , prove through their intimate handling of subjects and detailed renderings of physical beauty and faults that a portrait of another can be just as personal. Pierson’s…
You aren’t quite sure who Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood are, but those names sound so familiar. Wait, weren’t they on that show with? Or didn’t they? No bells ring in your head. Lately, though, the comedians have received plenty of exposure, thanks to the improvisational bonanza Whose Line Is…
6/19 The first time my daughter ripped off a head and started to suck, it was a shock. It was Crawfest 2000, held in the Esplanade at Fair Park, and everyone was eating bugs. Big plates of crawfish and potatoes and corn were being devoured as everyone ignored the sweltering…
