NT Live is the best of British theater captured live and broadcast in HD to theaters around the world. And if you win this Big Deal you can catch the next NT Live production in the series This House  from your comfy seat at the Angelika Film Center at Mockingbird Station in Dallas or at The Shops at Legacy in Plano.

Written by contemporary playwright James Graham, This House takes a satirical look at 1970s British politics, a not-so-funny time when the Parliament was divided and in crisis. A divided government? Now, where have I heard that before? NT Live broadcasts also features behind–the–scenes footage and interviews with the artists.

And you may want to take the opportunity to sign up for our other Big Deals for this week - tickets for Cara Mía Theatre Co.’s The Dreamers: A Bloodline and tickets for Reinventing Radio: An Evening with Ira Glass at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. Make sure you are first an Art&Seek e-newsletter subscriber then sign up for any of the Big Deals.

Sign up below for tickets to see This House at the Angelika Film Center at Mockingbird Station in Dallas.

UPDATE:  We have our winners. 

And sign up here for tickets to see This House at the Angelika Film Center at The Shops at Legacy in Plano.

UPDATE:  We have our winners.  Thanks for playing. Don’t forget to come back next week.

MEET THE COMPETITORS: The first notes of the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition are still a few days away. But tonight, the competitors will learn the order in which they will perform during the annual draw party. If you want to go ahead and pick someone to pull for, you can learn all about each player through Theater Jones’ player profiles.

TALKING CRITICISM: Late last month, a panel of local arts writers convened at CentralTrak for a discussion called Art Writing & Art Criticism in Texas. Our own Jerome Weeks served as moderator for the chat, which also featured Frances Colpitt, Charles Dee Mitchell, Peter Simek and Charissa Terranova. If you missed it, the crew over at Art This Week rolled tape, which you can now watch on the site.

WORTH THE RISK: American symphony orchestras are constantly looking for ways to reverse the long-running trend of declining ticket sales. That’s not the newsy part. What is news is that all that fear over programming modern music may be flawed. A new study shows that potential concertgoers are not turned off by contemporary music. Which is not to say that the standards don’t boost ticket sales. Rather, programming a modern work is no more risky than programming a lesser known older work. All good news for the living, breathing composer.

Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get down to work. Check back weekdays at 1 p.m. for another one.

It’s just what it sounds like.

AT THE EISEMANN: The Eisemann Center has released the huge list of performances that will make up its 2013-14 season. The season is broken up into a few subseasons – including a Theatre Comedy Series and Family Theatre Series. And, of course, there’s the MainStage shows, which will include an acoustic show from Clint Black, Flipside: The Patti Page Story and Debby Boone and the Glen Miller Orchestra, among others. Jeffrey Siegel’s Keyboard Conversations series is also back for another year.

THE HOST FAMILIES: When the 30 competitors at this year’s Cliburn Competition finish up a day of exhausting performance, rather than head back to a dreary hotel, they get to return to the home of their host families. It’s a tradition that’s been in place since the first competition and one that both the competitors and local music fans seem to enjoy. Both the players and the families are quizzed about their preferences to make sure the match is a good one. But Maureda Travis, the host committee chair, tells theaterjones.com there is one common request. “I have families who come up and say to me, Oh, if you could match us with an Italian,” she says. “The Italian competitors are so sociable, and the minute they have a bit of down time, they always want to get into the kitchen and cook!”

THEY LOVE LYLE: The Lone Star Film Festival has announced that Lyle Lovett will receive its Stephen Bruton Award this year. The award is named for the late Fort Worth guitarist and goes to a Texas musician who’s impacted the film world. ”As a musician with a highly original sound, Lyle Lovett has long had a relationship with cinema,” Lone Star’s artistic director Alec Jhangiani tells dfw.com. “His songs have been included in 30 films and he has appeared as an actor in eight.” This year’s festival is Nov. 6-10.

Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get down to work. Check back weekdays at 1 p.m. for another one.

Visual proof that you’ve gotta look at those labels.

Poseidon, the Sea God – Enemy of Odysseus (left) and Circe, the goddess-sorceress (right)

The artist Romare Bearden is famous for his bold, brightly colored collages. But they’re most often portraits of jazzy Harlem nightlife or images from his dirt-poor, North Carolina childhood  — those are what made his reputation. But the Amon Carter Museum has a new show of Bearden’s artworks — and they’re illustrations of Homer’s Odyssey. KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports this is not such a change of pace.

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Romare Bearden once advised a younger artist to become a blues singer. But the painter had to use his canvas for his song. Bearden said, “You improvise. You find the rhythm and catch it good and structure it as you go along. Then the song is you.”

In the opening of The Odyssey, Homer, the poet, prays to his muse to help him sing the song of Odysseus, the story of the wily Greek warrior’s struggles to return home after the Trojan War. Thinking of The Odyssey as a blues song or a jazz standard, therefore, is not such a radical move. Bearden is simply improvising on a classic tune.

Shirley Reece-Hughes is assistant curator of paintings and sculpture at the Amon Carter: “Bearden always operated in that manner, looking at jazz and thinking about that improvisational quality. And to a certain extent, he is riffing And that improvisational quality manifests in the way that Bearden re-interprets Homer’s Odyssey in new ways.”

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PHILANTHROPY IN THE CITY: It’s pretty obvious that Dallas has a strong philanthropic community. Every new museum and park is named after someone. But did you ever wonder how that giving culture came to be and how it operates? That was the subject of a front-page Points story in Sunday’s Dallas Morning News. It’s got plenty of behind-the-scenes insight from the major players. But Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas of president Richard Fisher pretty much sums it all up. “Dallas has always been a city driven by private philanthropy, with active civic involvement going hand in glove with the accumulation of wealth. Now, with the enormous riches that have come with Texas’ economic boom — not just in oil and gas but in financial and business services, technology, health care and other areas — the levels of philanthropic giving have skyrocketed to levels that would be unimaginable most anywhere else in America.”

AND THE WINNER IS: Fort Worth artist Marshall Harris has been named the winner of the $50,000 Hunting Art Prize. The award is given to Texas artists 18 and up who specialize in either painting or drawing. Harris is known for his life-sized drawings and the details he captures in things like saddles. “I want to take and draw the viewer in to looking at something like they’ve never looked at it before,” Harris tells dfw.com. “That’s the only way I can create, is to really look at something. Sometimes there are shadows within shadows, and that’s what makes things look more dimensional than just a color in a dark space.”

QUOTABLE: “There was the joy of ‘You did it,’ but that wasn’t as significant to me as the relief, the feeling of after five years of chasing, of spending all of my money countless times auditioning, after feeling so close, yet so far, I had finally done it. Then I went back to join my friends, and had to pretend it was a phone call from my mother for what seemed like eternity until we were allowed to make the information public knowledge.”

- Matt Ransdell Jr., on stepping out of a restaurant to receive the call telling him he had landed the lead role in Artes de la Rosa’s In the Heights, which opened Friday. Ransdell tells the story of how he’s chased the part for years on theaterjones.com.

Guest blogger Bart Weiss is the artistic director of VideoFest and a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

I was recently in El Salvador, where I had an eye-opening look at another country’s media and gained a new appreciation for our system.

El Salvador is run by drug cartels/gangs. In addition to the politicians, both left and right, the cartels run the newspapers and commercial TV stations. And there is lots of crime here. So I learned not to trust anything I saw in the paper (It was in Spanish anyway).

Unfortunately, this sounds like many places in the world. But there’s one big difference. The Internet is virtually non-existent. Only 12 percent have any Internet service, and just 7 percent have cable TV. There is an alternative (i.e., non-cartel owned) newspaper. But it’s only online, which in this country isn’t very helpful.

All of this means there’s no smart phone culture in El Salvador. The Arab Spring couldn’t happen there.

In a place like this, a truly independent public broadcasting network would be really important. Indeed, that was the talk of the Input Conference, which brought me to the country in the first place.

But as I spoke to people, I got the real picture. Two guys I talked to have worked for an local station and were pretty much told to put in more pro-government programs. They wanted to produce programs about what was really happening and were told they soon could. But soon turned into a few years and they left out of frustration.

I found out there are actually many independent filmmakers in El Salvador, but none were included in the program and none were present at this conference, which was really odd. In the many Inputs I have been to, there has always been a major presence from local makers.

Sometimes it is important for us to stop and think how great it is that we have independent media and Internet service. If anything, we get too much media and media from all sides. But for people to be free, we need to know what is happening. Be glad you’ve got all the film and video you do.

Art&Seek presents This Week in Texas Music History. Every week, we’ll spotlight a different moment and the musician who made it. This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll follow a songwriter down country music’s “lost highway.”

You can also hear This Week in Texas Music History on Sunday at precisely 6:04 p.m. on KERA radio. But subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss an episode. And our thanks to KUT public radio in Austin for helping us bring this segment to you. And if you’re a music lover, be sure to check out Track by Track, the bi-weekly podcast from Paul Slavens, host of KXT’s The Paul Slavens Show, heard Sunday night’s at 8.

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On May 17, 1922, Leon Payne entered the Texas School for the Blind in Austin. Born without sight in Alba, Texas, in 1912, Payne performed with Bob Wills and others before establishing himself as a talented songwriter. He penned a number of tunes for such prominent artists as George Jones, Elvis Presley and Jim Reeves. However, Leon Payne may be best remembered for writing one of Hank Williams, Sr.’s biggest hits, “Lost Highway.”

Leon Payne died in 1969. In 1971, country music legend and fellow Texan George Jones recorded an entire tribute album of Payne’s songs. In 1997, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.

Next time on This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll learn about the first-and-only four-way-hit songwriter.

In the Saturday Spotlight, it’s a night of art openings all over Dallas! Find the comic book inspired works of Ruben Nieto in the exhibition “Shadow Paintings” at Cris Worley Fine Arts. Check out three new exhibitions at McKinney Avenue Contemporary – “Beyond Abstraction: Recent Works by Six North Texas Artists,” “The Fall of Bonnie and Clyde” and “Homage to a Mentor.”  PDNB Gallery opens its group show, simply titled “Group Show.” And at Cohn Drennan Contemporary, three artists present three series of paintings in “Frayed Elements: Surface Tension and Eye Candy.”