Cuban-born Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls, published in 1992, two years after its author’s death, captured not only Arenas’s own anguish, but the anguish of his native land’s bitter descent into the hell of Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. It provided the inspiration for a much-lauded movie in 2000. Saturday night at Bass Performance Hall, Fort Worth Opera presented a third manifestation of Arenas’ journey with the premiere of Cuban-American composer Jorge Martin’s operatic setting.

Martin’s version picks up several strands of operatic ..read more

Via Lawson Taitte on the Dallas Morning News’ Artsblog, tonight’s Avenue Q performance will be dedicated to the late-actor Gary Coleman. Coleman features in the play as a parody character based on the child star. As FrontRow’s theater critic David Novinski put it:

“As if to embody the message of the show, one of the characters is a former child celebrity. What better medium could there be to convey that adulthood comes whether you’re ready or not. This show talks to us like kids, reminding us that we’re not.”

Parodying the late-television star on the day of his death may come off as insensitive, dampening the humor at the Winspear. But it must be noted that in his later years, Coleman even took to parodying himself. In a 2000 interview, Coleman explained why:

“I parody myself every chance I get. I try to make fun of myself and let people know that I’m a human being, and these things that have happened to me are real. I’m not just some cartoon who exists and suddenly doesn’t exist.”

Coleman’s death reemphasizes that existence, and the Coleman role in the play may bear even more weight now tonight given the context. Jerome Weeks on the role.

Photo: (Center) Nigel Jamaal Clark in the Gary Coleman role in Avenue Q, between Princeton (Brent Michael DiRoma) and Kate Monster (Jacqueline Grabois) Photo © John Daughtry 2009.

Last week Rachel Whiteread visited town for the opening of her retrospective drawing exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Next week, another contemporary master, Luc Tuymans, will open a show across the street at the Dallas Museum of Art. “I do not trust any images, including my own,” Luc Tuymans tells KERA’s Krys Boyd in an interview you can listen to here. The Belgian artist will also be speaking at the DMA next Thursday. The traveling show has already been positively reviewed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Luc Tuymans in his studio (Photo © Grant Delin; Courtesy David Zwirner, New York via the DMA)

Regular reader and friend of the show, David Burrows of D Burrows Media has two extra tickets to Sunday’s performance of Avenue Q at the Winspear Opera House that he just dropped off at the D offices. If you can make it to our offices downtown by 5 p.m. today and are the first person to email me with the name of any one of the three musicals Avenue Q beat out to win the Tony for best musical 2004, then they are yours. Remember, this is the play David Novinski called “not pretty, but pretty funny.” Email me at peter.simek@dmagazine.com. And . . . go!

Update: Right answers galore, and we have a winner. But stay tuned – more giveaways likely next week.

I’ve been enjoying the theater season announcement hype over the past month or so. The Dallas Theater Center offered a stylish mid-morning soiree on the top of the Wyly, while Theatre Three hosted a private party at a donor’s house. Yesterday, Water Tower Theater streamed the season announcement live over the internet. One play wasn’t much of a surprise: Water Tower will produce Horton Foote’ The Traveling Lady, which means the company, as expected, will participate in the citywide Horton Foote Festival scheduled for next spring. Other plays include works bye Stephen Dietz (Shooting Star), Thornton Wilder (Our Town), Annie Baker (Circle Mirror Transformation), Martin McDonagh (The Lieutenant of Insihmore), and the sci-fi musical Little Shop of Horrors. For more information, visit here.

There’s something about Jake Gyllenhaal that just doesn’t do it for me as an action hero. Maybe it’s those puppy dog eyes, his dim-witted expressions, that boyish charm – he fires soft and sensitive in every direction, even when script and settings call for Harrison Ford’s ironic virility. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Gyllenhaal is the one glaring miscast as Dastan, the Prince of Persia, who is a cross between Sinbad, Ali Baba, and Indiana Jones.

It seems ..read more

1. The AMC Grand, the nation’s first megaplex movie theater, is closing after 15 years, as AMC has chosen not to renew its lease at the location, reports the Kansas City Business Journal. As reporter David Twiddy notes in the article, the AMC Grand ushered in a new era of movie watching which paired perks like stadium seating, large screens, great sound systems, and numerous show times, with an unquenchable appetite for blockbusters to fill said theaters. The AMC Grand sparked a building boom of megaplexes, however “almost all of the big chains — but not AMC — eventually went bankrupt because of the massive construction costs.”

2. Glasstire’s artist studio tour photo essay series, Glass Houses, catches up with Dallas artist Marjorie Schwarz, who works out of a spare bedroom in the back of her duplex apartment. It’s also a good excuse to catch up with the previous edition of Glass Houses, which featured FrontRow contributor Noah Simblist and his significant, artist Margaret Meehan.

3. Brace yourself for the latest arts controversy: next week the Cathedral of Hope opens Corpus Christi, a play by Texas-playwright Terrence McNally that sets a modern day retelling of biblical events in Texas, depicting Jesus and his Apostles as gay. The Dallas Voice speaks with director Nic Arnzen:

“We’ve been taking a deep breath about bringing this to Texas,” he says. “We were writing it off as all conservatives but then learned you have the largest gay church and the largest gay men’s chorus around.” That helped curb their concerns — although it  raised others.

“We have had a person walk out once because she thought it was a bad representation of Texas, not because of the way it portrayed [the gay-religious content],” he says. Ultimately, though, Arnzen thinks its message is affirming for gay people of faith and Texas.”

Mid-August Lunch (Pranzo di ferragosto) is a foreign film you could very well see American distributors balking at releasing. It’s a local color piece – a movie steeped in inside jokes about Italian – and specifically Roman — culture that don’t easily translate. That said, Americans are fascinated with all things Italian, and the surface romance of the country is enough to make cozying up in front of Gianni Di Gregorio’s passeggiata of a film an enjoyable “Roman Holiday” for ..read more

Art is so cool these days. Everyone’s got to have it.  Even whole streets, block after block, apparently need a requisite amount of it in order to fit in, or so it would seem on the newly revived east Henderson Avenue. An urban beautification effort called the Henderson Art Project has plopped a number of public sculptures on the avenue as selected by a jury. Like a mid-life crisis Corvette, the art in the Henderson Art Project is a surrogate ..read more

“Photography” by David Nix at the Belmont Hotel – May 26 : 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM 901 Fort Worth Avenue, Dallas, Tx 75208

“Impressions of Europe” by Matthew Alexander at the Alex Barnes Fine Art – May 27 : 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM1019 Slocum Street, Dallas, Tx 75207

“Artist Talk by Chris Lattanzio” at the Dahlia Woods Gallery – May 27 : 7:30 PM – 8:30 PM 600 Cantegral Street, Dallas, Tx 75204

“Trigger Happy” by Cathey Miller at The Magnolia ..read more