It is rare for a Shakespeare production to include references to Smokey Robinson, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Starburst, Golden Corral, Cheerios, Marlon Brando, Rodney Dangerfield, Fat Albert, phallic pickles, and Billy Ray Cyrus, but Matthew Tomlanovich’s Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare Dallas is hardly purist. The bard’s early play is itself silly, with elements of farce, raunchiness, slapstick, and even stand-up, but this production is relentlessly goofy, full of yuk-yuk’s and self-commentary and chaotic re-interpreting of the language.

The plot ..read more

1. The reviews are in, and It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman is . . . okay. Lawson Taitte says the revisal of the musical is “almost super:”

Not everything works yet. Using a narrator to frame the piece only distracts from the story, and the prologue on the planet Krypton is a clunky idea. The first act goes on too long, while the disjunctive second lacks a musical focus.

Gary Cogill says the play is “odd and mostly uneven.” Alexander Bonifield says the musical numbers offer “nothing particularly memorable,” though it is “perfect for that special family outing.” FrontRow’s Lindsay Wilson agrees that the music isn’t anything to write home about, but was impressed by Patrick Cassidy’s Max Menken, who, “owns the show.”

Variety is largely more positive than the in-town critics (take that Spiegelman), saying the show is “so buoyantly lightweight that it practically floats up, up, and away,” and that it “could become a regional theater staple.” And while reviewer Joe Leydon wasn’t a fan of the “annoying” newsboys and the “insufficiently soaring” final scene, he concludes that the piece is “an enjoyably lively trifle.”

2. The Dallas Museum of Art opened its doors to dance over the weekend, reports Chris Shull, as 15 dance troupes and choreographers performed two hour-long sets of new modern dance pieces in the museum’s atrium.

3. The Kimbell Art Museum is building that Renzo Piano addition, but it will need to raise a little cash first to fund the project. The museum is going to put up a $62 million bond package, and according to The Bond Buyer, it’s a good buy for investors. Interestingly potential bond buyers see the Kimbell’s collection as collateral:

The museum’s assets, primarily the art collection, can be used to pay debt service.

Take out your cell phone. Is there a video camera built-in? Feel your pockets. Do you have a Flip camera handy? Capturing moving images – once a rarefied, deliberate practice – has become as easy as fishing in your pockets for a device and pointing the lens. With this in mind, the Dallas Video Festival and FrontRow are launching a new video competition called “The Texture of Dallas: A Hand-held View of the City.” The idea is simple: take out ..read more

In the latest edition of the print product, I wrote about Dallas Museum of Art Director Bonnie Pitman’s efforts to expand the reach of the museum. Her research into museum audiences has caught the attention of some of the country’s major art institutions, include the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Last week in the Financial Times, a profile of Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas Campbell shows that Pitman’s approach to museum administration is very much in vogue. From the piece:

Museums are having to reinvent themselves in the 21st century as they compete with the dizzying variety of audio-visual stimuli on offer. As a portentous New York Times commentary put it on the announcement of Campbell’s surprise appointment nearly two years ago: “In a culture of American Idol and Damien Hirst, the Met can no longer rely on the singularity of its objects to justify its existence.”

Campbell objects to this assessment of the museum’s practices. He tells the Financial Times’ Peter Aspden:

I think I’d almost claim the opposite. I’d say that in a world of mass-marketing and disposable digital imagery, the Met repository of some 2m objects spanning 5,000 years is ever more important as a place of reflection, as a place where you can get a bit of space to look at things that were hard-won, the product of art. . . .

What I’m trying to do is to get the museum rethinking the visitor experience from the moment that people arrive at the museum: the signage they encounter, the bits of paper they pick up, all the way through to the way we deliver information in the galleries. And obviously that’s an enormous task. We’ve got a million square feet of gallery space and tens of thousands of objects on display, so nothing’s going to change overnight.

Southern Methodist University has announced a new endowed chair in art history and a new art history Ph.D. program, the first in North Texas. Dr. Roberto Tejeda will join the arts faculty in August as the new Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History, a position that will be funded by a $2 million grant from an anonymous donor. The news marks a significant step forward in the institution’s push to become the leading center of arts education in the ..read more

Superman is faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound, but can he sing? Charles Strouse and Lee Adams sure thought so, and one year after their musical Bye Bye Birdie became a hit on Broadway they penned a campy, goofy show in conjunction with original librettists David Newman and Robert Benton. That version—a critical success but commercial flop—has been all but ignored since it shuttered over forty years ago. ..read more

1. Dallas is ranked number five on this list of top U.S. art cities on away.com. The rankings are very museum-driven, so I’d hope we would make it high on the list (right behind New York, Sante Fe, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.). Fort Worth also makes the list at number 10, so it’s a good showing/plug for our art ecosystem (for what it’s worth).

2. Why all the fuss about the Dallas Theater Center’s It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman revival/revisal, wonders Jerome Weeks. Rewriting and reworking Broadway musicals is nothing new: Irene, Guys and Dolls, Carousel, Grease, South Pacific – the list goes on.

3. Over on dallasnews.com, Michael Granberry offers some summer art options, and my favorite has to be the art camp at the Creative Arts Center in East Dallas called Camp MetalHead. The camp is directed towards helping “at-risk kids” obtain job skills and arts instruction, and teaches kids how to weld and make metal sculptures. I wonder if they take at-risk arts writers.

The enthusiastic critical response to Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and the C.I.C.A.E. Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, has everything to do with the film’s distinct clarity of tone. At its core, Winter’s Bone is a simple movie, about a 17-year-old girl in the Ozark backwoods who is searching for her convict father. But its rich color; the steady, heavy pacing; the faces of its supporting cast ..read more

Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s work (Melissa P., Cuoco contadino) isn’t as well known in the States as some other Italian filmmakers, but Sono L’Amore (I am Love) may change that. Set against a family drama about wealthy industrialists from Milan who are struggling to transition the family company into the global business world, Tilda Swinton plays Emma Recchi, the wife of patriarch Tancredi (Pippo Delbono). Her son Edoardo (Flavio Parenti) befriends a chef, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), and Emma becomes enamored ..read more

Last night, AIA Dallas’ Young Architecture Forum hosted the third Dallas-based Pecha Kucha event. Pecha Kucha is a idea that comes from Tokyo, and in Japanese, the name means something like “chit-chat.” Simply put, the event brings together a collection of creative people working in different genres and mediums to give rapid-fire presentations about their work: twenty slides per person, with only twenty seconds per slide to talk about the content. Though they only started in Dallas earlier this year, ..read more