A new novel, a tango opera, and great pop music: Just a few of the things we’re expecting from some North Texas artists in the coming year.

The Kitchen Doggers’ terrific actors hit the road with a mother and her estranged daughter doing the cross-country, voyage-of-self-discovery thing. But in this regional premiere, the road wins.

Turner Prize-winning British artist Tony Cragg calls himself a materialist – for the ways he’s expanded sculpture’s vocabulary with modern materials and turned those materials inside-out. The Nasher exhibition is a sinuous swirl of stone, wood, metal and plastic.

Morphing is Matt Posey’s erratically hilarious, deconstruction-burlesque of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. But it’s telling that amid the raucous comedy, the most remarkable moments come from a gentle, haunting character in drag — glowing like a beacon.

… they’re not quite so likely to sell their judgment for $5. The New York Times reports that a sizable number of ‘online reviews’ from book readers / movie patrons / new product owners have been bought and sold. It’s a booming market, let’s give it a thumbs up.

Good old Faust used to be one of the most popular operas in the repertory. It’s not that any more, but the Santa Fe Opera shows it would be a mistake to underestimate the potential of a work with such a treasure chest of appealing music.

The Santa Fe Opera’s performance of Vivaldi’s “Griselda” plods along earnestly but tests patience despite the innovations of superstar stage director Peter Sellars.

An extraordinarily powerful performance of Berg’s “Wozzeck” adhered to a long tradition that the Santa Fe Opera will continue in a time of uncertainty in the world of opera.

A president is losing his re-election bid and sets out to raise the necessary campaign funds any way he can — including canceling Thanksgiving and marrying lesbians on TV. Stage West presents the Texas premiere of David Mamet’s political satire ‘November.’

A Philip Glass-Allen Ginsberg collaboration from 1990, ‘Hydrogen Jukebox’ is another smart bit of counter-programming by the Fort Worth Opera. The chamber opera about Ginsberg’s America, circa 1950s thru ’90s, can be potent, even ravishing — when it isn’t tiresome.