Next year’s Fort Worth Opera Festival will feature the company’s first fully-staged works by Philip Glass and George Frideric Handel, and its first “off-site” production at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center.

Saw one of Texas’ best writers, Ben Fountain (author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara), at the station yesterday. Readers of his short stories (or my profile of him for the DMN years ago) know of Ben’s fascination with Haiti. He just came back from another visit recently — which he’s reporting on for this [...]

The downtown park, designed by Lawrence Halprin, has just been placed on the National Register of Historic Places — the announcement was made in D.C. today. This comes slightly over a year after it was also named one of Texas’ most endangered historic sites. The 112-acre park next to the Tarrant County Courthouse has fallen into disrepair, has structural problems — which is why it’s currently fenced off and closed to the public as unsafe.

Congratulations to Shri of Frisco, the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest!

In Philadelphia Sunday to receive a lifetime achievement award, Charles Strouse — Tony Award-winning composer of Bye Bye Birdie, Annie and It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman!, which is set for a major revival at the Dallas Theater Center next month — fell ill while being interviewed onstage at the Arts Bank, reports [...]

AND ABBEY MAKES 10: Well-deserved congratulations go to Abbey Siegworth, who has just earned a two-year contract to become the 10th member of the Dallas Theater Center’s resident acting company. DTC has announced that every other year a graduate of the program will earn a two-year deal.

Last week, the story was that SMU’s Meadows Museum now had three paintings that had once been stolen by the Nazis — although buried deep in the story was the fact that both Meadows officials and Robert Edsel, author of The Monuments Men, felt that the museum’s rightful ownership of the paintings would eventually be [...]

Elaine Taylor at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center just sent over a note that there are still a few open slots for Thursday’s Professional Review.  Benito Huerta, Director of The Gallery at UTA; Christina Rees, Director of The Art Galleries at TCU; or Judy Nelson, accredited art appraiser and curator, will be doing the [...]

Texas author and TSU prof Dagoberto Gilb has a little hot streak going when it comes to major magazines. Earlier this month, his short story, “Uncle Rock,” was published in The New Yorker, along with a “Book Bench” Q&A with him on The New Yorker’s website. Then, in the new (June) issue of Harper’s, his [...]

Performing Arts Fort Worth today will present the Bayard H. Friedman Award for Outstanding Student in Performing Arts. One of the co-winners is a 15-year-old pianist who is already a college senior. KERA’s Stephen Becker reports that Sahun Hong accelerated his development by living with his piano teachers: