Lyric Stage has polished up another forgotten gem of American musical theater. And what a gleaming beauty it is. The Golden Apple retells The Iliad and The Odyssey in grand comic operatic style, its characters plunked down in 1910 in a small town...
Ochre House's latest oddity is a new light sci-fi drama written and directed by company member Kevin Grammer. Flower in the Machine takes its time -- about an hour too much, frankly -- to show what happens when romance withers in a world overrun by ...
By Monica Hinman "People used to say 'Bon Voyage", comments Rick Steves at the beginning of our phone conversation. It was a way to express excitement and adventure, instead of "Have a safe trip," which suggests fear and danger. Why such an ominou...
Our Best of Dallas 2014 issue rolls out this week. While we can modestly say it's the greatest, most comprehensive city guide ever created, Dallas is a pretty big place that's filled to the brim with best-ness. To cover all the good stuff we might ha...
Couples Yoga or Spectrum Dance Theater? Donald Byrd has a dance career to would make anyone envious. For more than four decades, he has been living his dream of creating, performing, and educating. Oh, and he cut his teeth working for Twyla Thar...
Mixmaster presents "100 Creatives," in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. Katherine Owens has...
Denzel Washington in The Equalizer: "It's about a guy who is a knight in shining armor, except he lives in a world where knights don't exist anymore." He's talking about Don Quixote but he's really talking ABOUT HIMSELF. As Bob McCall in The Equa...
I'm baaaaaack. It's that time again. Fried food, bird shows, no bird shows (sad face), and a visit with your old buddy, Big Tex. The State Fair of Texas officially opens Friday, and as usual we've got your go-to guide of what to do when you get t...
90 degrees is plenty hot for a day at the pool. Summer's over. Well, according to the calendar. For North Texans, the end of summer can be bittersweet. On the one hand, the mercury will finally drop to a tolerable level, but it also means no more...
When The Brittany Murphy Story aired on Lifetime earlier this month, articles upon articles slammed the movie for its bad acting, bad wigs, and ultimately bad writing (surprise!). But among all of the negative press, actor Adam Hagenbuch seemed to r...
By Michelle Foster On a suburban corner in Plano, across from a llama farm, Celebration Event Center and Ballroom is home to a bunch of oddballs called Circus Freaks who run Open Stage, a weekly romp of weirdness guaranteed to make you feel things....
Some weeks in this business feel like shouting upwind. This was not one of those weeks. In the cover story of last week's Dallas Observer, I posed the question, "Other cities have big, iconic bookshops, why don't we?" Apparently, you all have a lot ...
The Patio at HG Sply Co, one of many Lower Greenville hangouts. Our Best of Dallas 2014 issue rolls out this week. While we can modestly say it's the greatest, most comprehensive city guide ever created, Dallas is a pretty big place that's filled ...
There's someone crying, another...whimpering? But that's it. The Meyerson is a vacuum. There's an odd mood coursing through the rows of seats, a breathless silence, total and creaky. It hangs in the air like an iron blanket. The audience is motionles...
It's also a sport of trends. The staples of the sport have been passed down from generation to generation dating back to one pioneering warrior who dared to pull off the first suplex or sneak a folding chair into the ring behind the ref's back. The t...
The Dallas VideoFest announced that the star of Saturday Night Live, This is Spinal Tap and The Simpsons will receive this year's Ernie Kovacs Award, a special recognition that honors "the career and talents of some of television's greatest visionari...
It's an atypical design exhibition, as its neither a retrospective (at just 44, Heatherwick has projects planned for years to come) and it doesn't come bearing the signature of the architect. There are no sketches leading to models, culminating in bu...
Don't you want to lick it? I'm not for dessert after dinner. Honestly, I'm not much for sugar. I don't put it in my coffee; I don't crave pumpkin pie in the fall; and icing gives me a headache. But when it comes to art, my personal taste would m...
By Justin Hunt On Sunday, 500X Gallery concluded its first show of the season, Ripe Produce: 500X Members Exhibition. An annual tradition of displaying member works, this year's show introduced twelve new members into the sixteen-person collective. ...
The walls of the Dallas Contemporary's main gallery wear unfamiliarly dark shades of black and maroon. When it's empty, the space seems more reverent, more immersive. All you hear is the click of your heel meeting the floor, and all you see are the r...