With each successive Sacha Baron Cohen project, it feels as if the comedian’s best work may be behind him. If you had to pinpoint a moment that represented the best of what Cohen’s brand of humor can produce, look up the interviews he conducted as Ali G with Newt Gingrich or a number of NBA stars. Da Ali G Show offered a kind of high-minded candid camera masquerading as dimwitted contemporary broadcasting. Often brutal and unsympathetic to the interviewees, there ..read more

The Dallas Opera announced Tuesday evening that it has commissioned a new opera, Everest, a one-act piece that will debut in February 2015. The opera will be scored by British composer Joby Talbot, and the book will be written by Moby-Dick librettist and frequent Jake Heggie collaborator Gene Scheer.

The new work will be based on the 1996 Everest disaster in which a number of climbers were trapped in a blizzard near the summit of the world’s highest peak, including Dallas resident Beck Weathers. ..read more

If the playwright Harold Pinter is to be believed, truth is a variable. Versions of events rarely match up. People remember things differently or at least say they do. Reality and the unreal are mutable. The absurdist world of his plays, especially The Birthday Party, is our world, only spinning backwards or maybe just faster, unburdened by the need for explanation, yet imbued with a nihilistic understanding that our existence is finite but, most importantly, flammable. Everything we know could ..read more

FrontRow and the Magnolia Theater’s The Big Movie series continues this Tuesday with the final film in the New York-inspired Uptown/Downtown series, West Side Story, one of the most beloved musicals of all time.

As usual, we have three pairs of tickets to giveaway for tonight’s screening, which will start at 7:30 p.m. To get your hands on them, you just have to answer this question in the form below: What are the names of the two rival gangs that ..read more

The second edition of FrontRow Live, our one night blowout at the Dallas Contemporary that combines great music, art, theater, food, and free drinks, will take place on May 31. Get your tix here. Find out more about FrontRow Live here. And if you need some extra motivation, here’s Onra’s “High Hopes” to break up your Monday. Get your tix. Now.

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After opening on Saturday night at Bass Performance Hall with one grand old favorite opera about a diva—Puccini’s Tosca—Fort Worth Opera’s spring festival moved on to a contemporary one-act chamber opera—also centered around a diva as the main character—Sunday afternoon at Scott Theatre.

In the wake of the triumphant premiere of his Moby Dick in Dallas in 2010, Jake Heggie has moved securely to the forefront of living American opera composers. Area opera fans had previously become acquainted with his work ..read more

Whilst heading into one of the most admirably up-to-date opera festivals in the world—with two works by living composers in a four-production season—Fort Worth Opera opened its annual spring festival Saturday night at Bass Performance Hall with a hyper-traditional production of one of the all time hits from the traditional standard repertoire, Puccini’s Tosca.

This particular production offers everything a lover of traditional opera could want. Mammoth, realistic, and beautifully detailed new sets by Andrew Horn provided a backdrop that enhanced ..read more

That’s me in the photo above, interviewing Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto in his latest installation, Kink, which opens at the Nasher Sculpture Center this weekend. Neto’s known for is interactive creations — in London it was a pool, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, a series of biomorphic tunnels – and I asked the artist, while we were sprawled out in his knitted bridge-vein, whether or not it was too stereotypical to make a connection between the beachy demeanor of his work and his home town of Rio de Janeiro. That prompted a prolonged conversation about the influence of nature on culture, the neo-concretists of the 1960s, and the predominance of Platonic rationalism in Western Civilization (Brazil, he says, somewhat controversially, is not “western.” Not “western” like Europe or North America, that is).

We’ll bring you that conversation next week. For now, the Nasher shares this time-lapse video of the installation. Enjoy.

Photo by Julius Pickenpack for the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Today at 5 p.m. Oak Cliff-based artist Erica Felicella will climb into a Plexiglass “shell” where she will stay for the next 48 hours. The act is part of a performance piece, which will involve Felicella “experiencing her emotions as they surface,” and recording them on paper. And you can come and experience your emotions too, alongside the “Visible Shell Observation Team.” Or you can watch Felicella throughout the weekend online through this live stream (emotion experiencing optional).

It is all ..read more

The Fort Worth Opera kicks-off tomorrow at Bass Hall, where its festival season will bring a Puccini, a Mozart, and contemporary works by Mark Adaimo and Moby-Dick composer Jake Heggie.

But if you look for next year’s season around this time, you’ll be at of luck. The Fort Worth Opera announced today that the 2013 season will move to April and continue through May, offering another Puccini, a Donizetti, a Strauss, and a regional premiere of a new work by Tom ..read more

Since 1980, the Dallas Museum of Art has awarded more $540 thousand to young artists living and working in Texas, and some surrounding states. This year, ten artists have received grants from three funds, one didicated to young artists from 15 to 25 years old, another to artists under 30, and a third to fund travel for professional artists. The University of North Texas is well-represented among this year’s recipients, including Desiree Espada, who was a D Magazine photo intern ..read more

It’s a striking tableau – tinged with irony – that in the basement of a chalet overlooking Lake Geneva in the heart of Switzerland, a country famous for enjoying centuries of peace, rests one of the most extensive collections of artifacts from one of the most iconic battles in world history: The Alamo. Completing the compelling disconnect, the home is owned by English rock star Phil Collins, a man who, like many Europeans in his generation, fell in love with ..read more

In lieu of a review, here’s a nifty flowchart that will help you decide whether you’re the type of person who will enjoy the film.

THURSDAY

Inflatable Best Friend/The Nitch Pickens/Year of the Bear/Doom Ghost (1919 Hemphill): This would be a perfectly expectation-busting lineup for those that think 1919 Hemphill is nothing but hardcore and pop punk, as two of the acts here are described as employing “bass-shredding and drum-beating technical jams,” (The Nitch Pickens) or playing “experimental pysch” (Inflatable Best Friend).

Baruch the Scribe/voltRevolt/Achtone (Dan’s Silver Leaf): Achtone recently passed along a new single entitled, “Symmetrie,” which is due for release in “the next two weeks,” ..read more

I’m tired of vampires. I haven’t even seen any of the Twilight films — neither having been professionally required to do so, nor a teenage girl — and yet I find myself suffering fatigue of the undead. I am calling for a moratorium on all new TV or film productions about blood-sucking creatures of the night.

Was the world crying out for a movie remake of a 1960s gothic soap opera featuring vampires, ghosts, witches, and werewolves? Star Johnny Depp and director ..read more

Taika Waititi’s Boy takes place in the remote New Zealand countryside in 1984. The setting offers something of a visual disconnect, a primordial coastal paradise populated with rotted-out, beaten-down bungalows inhabited by the poor, salty kiwis. This is the world in which the story’s main character, known by the endearing, if diminutive “Boy” (James Rolleston) grows up. It is a place where the local general store is run by the boy’s aunt; where his only guardian, his grandmother, leaves her ..read more

Earlier this week, in the wake of the release of Sarah Jaffe’s second LP, The Body Wins, and an album release concert last Saturday at the Granada, the Dallas Morning News ran a photo gallery on its website with the headline, “See Local Artist Sarah Jaffe Through the Years.” While the gallery was certainly, in part, an effort on the part of the paper to monger a few extra clicks on the back of a popular local musician, it also ..read more

This STRFKR cover of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Get your tix here. Find out more about FrontRow Live here.

Here are this week’s gallery openings and events.

Image: Kevin Cooley, Skyward, 2012, (detail) 9 min 45 sec HD Video, in situ, installation view (in the video room at Marty Walker Gallery)

“Divorce Papers and Expensive Postcards” by Jose-Maria Cano at the Kristy Stubbs Gallery – May 10 : 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM; 25 Highland Park Village, Suite 106, Dallas, Tx 75205.

“Dreams and Delusions: Hand Altered Photographs” by Lindsay Gray at The Upstairs Gallery – May 10 : 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM; 1038 ..read more

Just days before sending me a copy of the new Brave Combo album, Carl Finch was busy trying to make a CD that will listen seamlessly, without any pauses to between songs, so that I can get what he calls “the flow of the whole thing.”  Extra efforts like this are at the core of what Finch is about: making sure people hear the music in the proper context and of the best quality.  He cannot control the reception, but ..read more

For some people, nothing’s scarier than a bunch of hyper youths with an amplified opportunity to voice their disillusionment amidst the frenetic chords of punk rock. It’s even scarier when that display is technically categorized as Tony Award-winning theater. A number of people walked out during opening night of American Idiot, the touring Broadway musical built around Green Day’s seminal 2004 album of the same name. Those who stayed, however, were treated to an extraordinarily staged narrative of the rage, ..read more

The Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau is looking to capitalize on new Texas legislation that allows for the adoption of non-geographic Public Improvement Districts, or PIDs, which would levee a two percent sales tax on hotels in Dallas. And of the estimated $10 million that could be generated by a new Tourism PID, DCVB head Phillip Jones says upwards of $3 million will be earmarked towards promoting cultural tourism.

That news, which came via a city of Dallas Economic Development Committee ..read more

bcWorkshop, one of CityDesign Studio architect Brent Brown’s two hats, has submitted two projects for consideration for the Corporation for National and Community Service’s 2012 National Service Impact Awards. The awards are given to projects that leverage architecture and design as community service in “key issue areas of the Serve America Act and disaster services.” bcWorkshop’s two projects include their energy efficient renovation of five homes on Congo Street in South Dallas, and the development of a disaster relief housing project on the Gulf Coast, which designed new housing for the hurricane prone region based on feedback gathered through community meetings with an emphasis on sociability and disaster preparedness.

The awards will be chosen both by a panel of Corporation for National and Community Service judges, as well as public vote. You can check out bcWorkshop’s two projects here and here. And you can vote right here.

A release regarding an art project prompted some of the usual, “Why is that art?” scoffing around the office yesterday, but I’ll let Cynthia Mulcahy take the lead in explaining her latest project, Seventeen Hundred Seeds, which has been sprouting on a field adjacent to Davis St. in North Oak Cliff.

You may remember Mulcahy’s last project, the community square dance she organized with fellow “art as social practice” practitioner Leila Grothe at the Audubon Center in South Dallas. Like that project, Seventeen Hundred Seeds ..read more

One of the perks of winning the USA Film Festival’s short film competition is that the winners qualify for the Academy Award nominations. That, and each of the winners pick up a $1,000 check. Here are the winners of this year’s edition:

Fiction

Child of the Desert by Iliana Sosa

Experimental

Grounded by Kevin Margo and Barrett Meeker

Animation

Wiggle Room by Joe Schenkenberg

Non-Fiction

Pot Country by Kate McLean and Mario Furloni

The USA Fest also gave a Student Award to Justin Tipping’s Nani, which also picked up the audience award and student film award at the Dallas International Film Festival. Child of the Desert won the Texas Award as well. And there were a few honorary mentions. Here’s the full release.

Image: Still from Child of the Desert