A small Dallas media company is in Las Vegas today at a national conference of TV executives. The company won the opportunity to pitch the execs their idea for a six-part “docu-soap”: a backstage look at the Fort Worth Opera and its three-shows-in-five-weeks season. Heartbreak and high Cs, ecstasy and exhaustion. Sex and violins.
Don’t let the civilized, gourmet-wine-lover look fool you. These people will tear you apart with their teeth and violate the remains. Second Thought Theatre’s comedy, Hunter Gatherers, posits that it doesn’t take much to trigger the beast within us — just some fine food and old friends. Too bad Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s play feels both over-the-top and undercooked.
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.
Once the local B. Dalton closes, that is. Rallies have protested, children have written letters — but NPR asks the question, does a bookstore really matter anymore?
Over on Frontburner, a long-held complaint against writer Larry McMurtry was lodged once again, understandably so, given his NPR interview with Linda Wertheimer this morning. He’s a relucant interview subject at best; at worst, he’s grumpy and borderline insulting. During my tenure as book critic at the Dallas Morning News, I’d heard the stories. And [...]
Designer toys — hand-made, limited-edition figurines — are a world-wide sub-culture. Or specialty market. But whether they’re art or commercial fad, they can sell for thousands of dollars. And in North Texas, they can be found at the Kidrobot store (that’s the neon logo) or in a funky, little Fair Park gallery where area artists show their work. Jerome Weeks reports.
How do today’s arts education programs prepare students to make a real living in the arts? Jose Antonio Bowen, Dean of the Meadows School of the Arts and Algur H. Meadows Chair and Professor of Music at Southern Methodist University, discusses the topic on a recent episode of Think.
The holiday season means holiday shows. Holiday shows means young performers acting and dancing onstage. And children onstage require adult guides. We talk to three North Texans whose job is to coax the children, train them and keep the little angels from running amok.
Weird science, that is. In Port Twilight, playwright Len Jenkin creates a surreal city in which different visions of the future are being sought out and decoded: genetic, messianic and cinematic. The Undermain Theater’s splendid world premiere is a dark, comic carnival where scientists dance, an alien speaks, a rabbi despairs and a shlocky filmmaker worries about getting the future right. Jerome Weeks reviews.
Five hundred people attended the groundbreaking Wednesday afternoon for the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Victory Park. KERA’s Stephen Becker reports on how the museum got its name.
