Admit it: as much as we pretend to enjoy intellectual, cultivated entertainment, there is a part of each of us that yearns for the exposed vulgarity of reality TV. Table-flipping, drink-throwing, insult hurling—watching others channel their most primitive selves is as thrilling as it is comforting, if only because it reinforces our own refinement. But how sophisticated are we, really? Playwright Yasmina Reza argues that no matter the cut of our clothes or the sum of our bank accounts, we ..read more

Class warfare and the battle of sexes broke out in Fort Worth Saturday night—at least onstage at Bass Performance Hall, where the Fort Worth Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro held up to the audience a cold, clear mirror of human folly.

Dissatisfaction was already smoldering across Europe when Pierre Beaumarchais wrote his play Le Mariage de Figaro, a not-so-thinly-veiled attack on the aristocracy, in 1781. Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, clearly sensed the inevitable fall of ..read more

As elegantly constructed, beautifully shot, and inspiring as Bess Kargman’s documentary First Position actually is, I have to admit I am growing weary of the competition doc genre. What movies like First Position offer – from Spellbound to A Surprise in Texas to Thank You For Judging – is a built in dramatic arc. We meet inspiring hopefuls who push through the drama of excruciating competition. The stakes are high, the tension is thick. And then, in the end – ..read more

The most enduring image of Ernesto Neto that remains after his weekend visit to Dallas for the opening of his exhibition, Cuddle on the Tightrope, at the Nasher Sculpture Center came during the opening reception. As rain began to drizzle down on the grounds of the Nasher garden, suited patrons and women in gowns squeezed underneath the overhang of Renzo Piano’s building, clutching their cocktails. Meanwhile, the artist, with his windblown curly grey locks falling down on his round, grinning ..read more

It’s not based on a movie or TV show. It doesn’t boast a C-list celebrity headliner. It isn’t a loosely strung-together staging of a popular music group’s catalog. Memphis is—believe it or not—an original Broadway musical, full of its own heart and rhythm. Perhaps because it’s been so long since we’ve been presented with something not “inspired by” or “based on,” some might find it a tad difficult to grab hold of Memphis. No matter—the show grabs us within the ..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

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

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

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

Paradoxically a one-off event, which ought to liberate it somewhat from the weight of expectations, the Dallas Biennale presents a fresh and stimulating cross-section of new art. It suggests that the sponsoring Dallas Contemporary, which in true hometown think-big fashion bills itself as “America’s Kunsthalle,” has the potential to be a kind of P.S. 1 for the city: fast-moving, improvisational and daring, if occasionally a bit rough around the edges. Happily, as curator Florence Ostende explains in her introductory essay, ..read more

The anticipation of the first blockbuster of the summer season, The Avengers, has hit near hysteria. It took in close to $200 million in just two days after being released overseas. It has filled up Twitter chatter for months. Now, when it finally hits theaters this Friday, riding a wave of pitch-perfect marketing and built-in fan fascination, there is only question left: is the new movie worth all the fuss?

In a word, absolutely. The Avengers is by far the best ..read more

Richard Linklater likes to listen to people talk. As early on as his breakthrough feature, Slacker, it’s been clear that he thinks everybody’s got a story worth telling, and that it’s worth stopping to listen to each of them, at least for a minute.

The Austin-based director saw a story worth telling in a 1998 article by Texas Monthly’s (and Dallas’ own) Skip Hollandsworth about a strange crime in the small East Texas town of Carthage and of the even stranger ..read more

The title character of Philippe Falardeau’s new film, Monsieur Lazhar, is an Algerian refugee who shows up at a school in Quebec and takes a difficult job as a teacher filling in for a young woman who hung herself in the classroom. We know little about the man, but there is enough to suspect that what he tells school administrators – that he was a long-time teacher in his native country – isn’t true. Maybe his wife was. Maybe he ..read more

Why aren’t there more hockey movies? You would think that a sport that provides both nail-biting game tension and fist-swinging boxing drama would get more screen time. Goon, by Canadian director Michael Dowse, is a new comedy that tries to capitalize on both. Pulling a page from Slap Shot (1977), the movie centers around the endearing, if dimwitted Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott), a going nowhere bar bouncer who is spotted by a minor league hockey coach when he beats ..read more

Calling Swedish director Ola Simonsson’s first feature, Sound of Noise, a musical comedy isn’t exactly wrong, but it likely won’t conjure up the right connotations. The absurdist, layered satire is a wildly irreverent, often hilarious comedy about a team of terrorists musicians, undaunted in their efforts to perform an ambitious avant-garde composition, “Music for One City and Six Drummers.” The desire to play that almost-impossible piece sets in motion a series of madcap episodes as the musicians confiscate bulldozers, kidnap ..read more

It has been a while since Wallace and Gromit creator and stop-motion animation master, Peter Lord, has directed a film. His new movie, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, reaches theaters this weekend twelve years after the release of his critically-acclaimed Chicken Run. It’s not that Lord hasn’t been working, only that he found himself swept-up in a career as a producer.

“I did find myself inadvertently becoming a producer, which I didn’t look for; it just happened,” Lord said during a ..read more

When I walked out of the Dallas Theater Center’s production of Next Fall, which opened Friday at the Kalita Humprehys Theater, I was puzzling out the central relationship, the mismatched couple of Luke (Steven Walters) –young, devotely Christian — and Adam (Terry Martin), a middle-aged atheist who can’t resist the temptation to rag on Luke’s faith every chance he gets to the point of sounding like a broken record. The play hinges on our understanding (acceptance, really) that love occasionally ..read more

Faced with his own always uncertain health and career security, and living in world rapidly careening toward two decades of war and tumult, Mozart responded, in 1791, with his operatic carnival The Magic Flute. Two hundred twenty years later, the piece continues to puzzle, delight, amaze, and, most importantly, challenge both performers and audiences.

The current production by the Dallas Opera, designed by August Everding for Chicago Lyric Opera and first presented there in 1986, emphasizes the comedy and whimsicality of ..read more

Whit Stillman’s first movie since 1998’s Last Days of Disco plays almost like an absurdist prequel of his first film, Metropolitan, caught some slightly skewed, alternative reality. Taking place on a college campus, Damsels in Distress is driven by the filmmaker’s characteristic wit and verbosity, a social drama revolving around a pack of snobby, if articulate and well-meaning co-eds. In an interview, Stillman said one viewer described the movie as Animal House meets Jane Austen. It is really is hard ..read more

British director Terence Davies’ first feature film in eleven years, The Deep Blue Sea doesn’t quite reach the same level of exquisite, elegiac nostalgia that have made his greatest films, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, beloved cinematic treasures. But the new movie does manage to bring together a compelling mix of social melodrama and a deep-feeling emotional tenor that drives much of the filmmaker’s work.

Set in the early 1950s, Rachel Weisz plays Hester, a woman separated ..read more

In his second film, Italian filmmaker Gianni Di Gregorio plays a middle-aged man taking one last chance at a zesty, extramarital affair. He comes on to his mother’s endowed caretaker, lunches blondes with his licentious lawyer friend, and sips drinks with his hard-partying downstairs neighbor. Literally “Gianni and the women,” in Italian, The Salt of Life feels like a cousin to Di Gregorio’s debut (at age 59, no less), Mid-August Lunch. Rich in the colors of lackadaisical Rome and salted by the details ..read more

This covers so many different types of nerd, I don’t even know where to begin taking fanboy shots. So we’ll just get to the good news. Yesterday, award-winning author and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman accompanied musician and wife Amanda Palmer—who performs with the “cabaret punk” act Dresden Dolls and has a successful solo career as well—for a Violitionist session in little old Denton.

Violitionist continues to rack up an impressive list of increasingly more well-known names for its bedroom-based interview series, and I was surprised by the sight of Gaiman popping up in my Facebook feed. His is an image I know quite well, since I based my leather jacket and sunglasses look on him in 9th grade, complete with Morpheus shirt. The jury is still out on whether or not I actually pulled that style off with any amount of success on my 14-year-old, 110 lb, six ft frame, but, “nerd” and “fanboy,” indeed.

Gaiman and Palmer were interviewed and even performed a duet together. The clip should premier sometime in late May. If you can’t wait until then, Amanda Palmer will be performing a “ninja” gig at Good Records this evening at 6 pm, which I’m assuming means kind of secret, and kind of not secret at all. The event is free.

Like one’s first visit to the Las Vegas strip, a first visit to an art fair can be a disorienting, even disturbing experience. Normally, in the gallery or museum context, an invisible army of curators does yeoman’s work in carefully selecting and presenting artwork according to specific historical and aesthetic criteria.

On the other hand, one of the great things about an art fair is that there is something for almost everyone. I was impressed by the small abstract paintings at ..read more

Thursday night at Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Guest conductor James Gaffigan and the Dallas Symphony presented a program made up entirely of works of Sibelius and Grieg. On first glance, such a program might appear to be inherently problematic. Both composers came from Europe’s cold northern edge; both are late romantic and, though hardly identical, share many stylistic features. Neither, though both are much beloved, rank in the top echelon of the musical pantheon.

But, while contradicting some of the ..read more