I have just heard from a very reliable source (or two) that Style Network’s Big Rich Texas has been picked up for a second season. Word is that Fly on the Wall Productions will still be in charge and filming begins in October. No, I’m not kidding. Bless their hearts.

Just being weird for the sake of being is just not enough. It takes a group of artists who can add flashes of creative genius and some social commentary to go beyond the territory of the merely curious to undiscovered countries of bizarre. The Ochre House brings the strange and so much more in their avant-garde production of Matthew Posey’s Morphing.

Posey writes, directs, and stars in this deconstruction of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night with his typical eye for the twisted and macabre. O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a family dealing with the mother’s off-again-on-again addiction to morphine is already dark; however, Posey incorporates live music, dance, video performance, and a large man-eating puppet.

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The Dallas Symphony’s financial needs are well documented, so this news is encouraging: longtime symphony supporter, the Texas Instruments Foundation, has awarded the city’s orchestra with a $300 thousand gift, part of a overall program of $1 million in new grants to North Texas arts organizations.

Other groups receiving awards include: Anita N. Martinez Ballet Folklorico, Chamberlain Performing Arts, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Dallas Children’s Theater, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Opera, Dallas Summer Musicals, Dallas Theater Center, Dallas Zoo, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Richardson Symphony Orchestra and the Turtle Creek Chorale.

Here’s the full release.

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Sundown Collaborative Theatre brought Cody Lucas’ play Happily Ever After to New York’s Fringe Festival this past week. So, it was a perfect time for a hurricane scare to shut down the city’s subways, throwing the fest into disarray. Over on TheaterJones, Lucas sends the final report on the groups experience:

It’s hard to try and reflect on everything this trip has been. I think a hurricane prematurely ending our run speaks volumes of the oddities that this trip has contained. New York has been amazing and I’ve seen why people love this place so much. Despite all the good, the trip has seemed like a lot of vaguely controlled chaos. . . .

Despite all of our preparation, the festival and the city were beyond our expectations. Previous essays talked about our two-hour tech rehearsal, taking the subway in costume and makeup to warm up on the sidewalk, 15 minutes to load in and out each show, a cast and crew of 12 spread out all over the city, a small earthquake, an unexpected allergic reaction, and that bitch, Irene. We also had a physically and emotionally demanding show.

Trying to stay focused was taxing. It was hard to gain momentum.

I heard we were doing well for a group from Texas. Our houses weren’t large, but 90 percent of the people had probably never heard of Sundown or even Denton before. Our Saturday show, I believe, was nearly full on presales. But alas, we ended quietly on Friday.

Image: Happily Ever After production photo (from left) Olivia De Guzman Emile, Tashina Chivonne Richardson, Zane Harris, Aaron Sanchez, Travis Stuebing, Nicholas Ross, Robert Linder

My episode 6 recap of Style Network’s Big Rich Texas will be up tonight. Meanwhile, guess which cast member this is.

That’s the rumor being stoked by this New York Times article (via the Texas Tribune), which argues the theater company is stepping out from the shadow of Houston’s Alley Theater, long considered Texas’ leading theater company.

Perhaps more notably, the Texas theater buzz has traveled north, to the Dallas Theater Center, a company that has recently made impressive strides. It presented the premiere of a musical comedy in early 2010 called “Give It Up!,” which recently had a successful Off Broadway run in New York under the title “Lysistrata Jones” and will open on Broadway this year, with a number of the original Dallas cast members. Another world premiere, a reworked version of the 1966 musical “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman,” was staged during the summer of 2010.

The company just wrapped its most recent season with nearly sold-out, well-reviewed productions of a pair of American musical staples: a hypereroticized version of “Cabaret” and a flashy revival of “The Wiz,” in which audiences sat in “pods” that stagehands moved throughout the performance. People are now whispering that the Dallas Theater Center may win a Regional Theatre Tony Award of its own.

High accolades indeed, which we must agree with, considering we just gave the DTC a nod as our city’s best theater. Still, the piece quotes DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty, TheaterJones’ Mark Lowry, and acting company member and future Broadway starlet Liz Mikel. I would have liked to see some opinions about the theater from non-homers. But at least the secret is out: the DTC is doing great stuff, and it will likely get even better.

Although most of the music performed during the Fort Worth Symphony’s “Celebrate America” festival last weekend at Bass Performance Hall was familiar, a three-day series devoted entirely to works of George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein cast much of that iconic repertoire in a unique light.

Music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya and the orchestra were in excellent season-opening form. The strings in particular have been honed, during the decade of Harth-Bedoya’s presence at the helm of the orchestra, into a precise ..read more

FRIDAY

Yells at Eels/Frode Gjerstad Trio (Rubber Gloves): Stavanger, Norway’s Frode Gjerstad is a decorated improviser with a career stretching back to the ’60′s. He has spent much of his time exploring the nuances and limits of the alto sax, but has also worked with trumpet and clarinet.

Oddly enough, Gjerstad’s current trio is his first all-Norwegian lineup since he was worked with such international free jazz heavyweights as German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and Dutch percussionist Han Bennink, a personal favorite as far as drummers are concerned.

The always excellent Yells at Eels will also perform, along with yet another saxophonist: Denton legend Mike Forbes, who is in town for the time being, on a break from California. Judging by the number of guest appearances he’s already made, the avant-leaning music community is glad to have him.

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Our Idiot Brother is not, thankfully, another drug and sex summer comedy, though it almost feels like its headed in that direction in its open scene. We meet the “idiot brother,” Ned (Paul Rudd) at a farmers market in a quaint little town. A uniformed police officer approaches Ned’s table, which is scattered with fresh veggies, and admits that he has had a hard week. He implies that he could use a little marijuana to pick up him up, and Ned, stupidly but nonetheless endearingly, offers some weed to the cop. He is promptly arrested.

This heart-rending sense of honesty is how Ned operates in the world. At one point he explains his life’s philosophy. Give other people the benefit of the doubt, he says, and they’ll rise to it. That attitude makes Ned a hilarious oddball, something of a cross between Jeff Daniels’ Harry Dunne from Dumb and Dumber and Jeff Bridges’ The Dude from The Big Lebowski. Not a bad recipe for laughs.

After Ned is released from jail, he finds out that his hippie girlfriend has brought another spacey doofus onto the farm, and Ned is forced to move back with his mother on Long Island. There we meet Ned’s sisters. Liz (Emily Mortimer) is married to the wealthy documentary filmmaker Dylan (Steve Coogan), who, in typical Coogan style, is a self-serving pompous ass of the highest proportions. Miranda (Elizabeth Banks) is a single aspiring writer who works for Vanity Fair and is trying to score her first break-through profile piece. Natalie (Zooey Deschanel) is a sex-crazed lesbian who’s caught in a kind of youthful period of self-destructive soul-wandering.

Liz, to Dylan’s dismay, tells Ned that the door to their Manhattan brownstone is always open, which the overgrown innocent takes as open offer to crash at their house. He moves in, forges a bond with their son, but begins unravel the lives of the adults, in part, by witnessing Dylan’s infidelity. When things get uncomfortable at Liz’s, Ned couch surfs over to Miranda’s place, and then to Natalie’s, all the while upsetting the normal rhythm of their lives with nothing more than his honesty.

In many ways Ned is just a dramatic foil, the wide-eyed innocent who shows up in his Manhattan-dwelling sisters’ lives just to make their world’s complications feel silly and superficial. But Rudd digs to find not only a likable goofiness in Ned, but an underlying sense of conviction. After all the laughs and foibles, we find that this is not just a hazy-headed hippie.

In one of the film’s best scenes, Ned scolds his sisters for ruining a family game of charades. It is a surprisingly jarring, moving scene. Ned proves that his sense of self-worth and unchecked capacity for love is anything but flakey. Despite all the laughter and skewering of our self-important worlds, there is a sense that deep familial hurt dwells beneath Our Idiot Brother’s welcoming surface, a pain or suffering that undercuts the present day trials and tribulations. Where is the family’s father? Why did Ned careen down such a drastically different life path than his sisters? Why do these women feel hell-bent on self-destruction? We never get any clear explanations because we don’t need them. We all know how families work. Beneath the laughter, we know that the unspoken things are precisely those that haunt us most acutely.

If there is a nostalgic takeaway to the director Nicolas Roeg’s David Bowie-starring sci-fi drama, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), it is the film’s reminder of just how trippy and far out Hollywood was once able to travel. The movie, about a mysterious man who shows up in a tiny town in the western united States only to quickly rise to head the world’s most powerful corporation, is a scattered, incoherent, indulgent mess of a film, but nonetheless appealing in its own quirky sense of self-worth, ambitious thematic content, and riveting style. The Angelika Film Center is re-releasing the film for its 35^th anniversary.

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