The Dallas Opera is joining forces with the Texas Book Festival and SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts to preview the opera’s world-premiere production of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick.

Dallas-area Abernethy Media Professionals has made a successful pitch to create a six-part series, a backstage “docu-soap” about this season’s Fort Worth Opera, for a national competition.

Douglas Carter Beane has been nominated for two Tony Awards for some very funny writing: his satire of closeted celebs, The Little Dog Laughed, and his musical spoof of the wretched roller-disco film, Xanadu. Now his musical adaptation of the classic Greek sex-and-war comedy, Lysistrata, is debuting at the Dallas Theater Center as Give It Up! Put down the spears: This time, it’s all about college basketball and cheerleaders.

This weekend’s concerts by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra spotlight a guest conductor and a key member of the orchestra. On Thursday night they produced one of the more pleasing programs of the season.
Conductor James Gaffigan, a young American, and concertmaster Emanuel Borok teamed for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, one of the composer’s most lyrical musical statements. [...]

Westerners often see African art as ‘folk crafts’ — anyone made them. But according to Roslyn Adele Walker, the DMA’s senior curator of African art, that’s because early explorers weren’t interested in individual artists. There actually have been celebrated artists in Africa, and the DMA has one of our country’s leading collections of their work. The museum has just released a new, sumptuous book by Dr. Walker, showcasing the collection’s riches.

The city-wide arts-education partnership among Big Thought, Dallas Independent School District, the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs, the Wallace Foundation and some 100 area arts organizations will continue — and head to the next level. That was the good news announced this morning at the Charles Rice Learning Center: The Wallace Foundation is handing over [...]

Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play finally comes to Texas, and Estelle Parsons gets to play the meanest-mouthed matriarch since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The drug-fueled, obscenity-strewn decline of an Oklahoma family eventually goes over the top, but the more-than-three-hour trip there is hilarious and harrowing.

Michael May of the Texas Observer visited both the AT&T PAC and the Cowboys Stadium (specifically its modern art), asking the question, “Can extravagant, cutting-edge art and architecture transform Dallas?”
Perhaps only in Dallas could the Super Bowl prospects of the home team get weighed in the answer:
Jones [Gene Jones, wife of Cowboys owner Jerry, an [...]

The touring production of August: Osage County opens its two-week run at the Winspear tonight. They play won just about every award a play can win in 2008, including the Tony and Pulitzer. It stars Estelle Parsons, who won an Oscar for playing Clyde Barrow’s wife, Blanche, in Bonnie and Clyde. She tells dallasnews.com that winning the Oscar had its downside.

JUST THE HARD-TO-MISS ONES: Travel writer Stephen Jermanok visits three new buildings in North Texas for the Boston Globe. Guess which ones?  Maybe the Cowboys Stadium, the Winspear Opera House and the Wyly Theatre?

[Stadium project manager Bill] Bury tells me that the arts district is ideal for out-of-towners because you can walk from downtown hotels [...]