Orchestrating Success
The Conductors of the Texas Music Festival When is a conductor more than a conductor? When he (or...
Close Up Space
When we first meet editor Paul Barrow, the protagonist of Molly Smith Metzler’s Close Up Space, making its regional premiere at Main Street Theater (MST), he’s self-righteously ripping through a series of emails from the headmaster at his rebellious daughter’s boarding school, tearing apart extemporaneous words and phrases [...]
‘Round 7’ at Lawndale Art Center
Why do we copy? Why do we appropriate imagery? Is it inherently different from the source? Perhaps these questions aren’t all asked overtly or even consciously in the Round 7 Lawndale Artist Studio Program Exhibition, but these themes percolate when considering the three artists together. The exhibition features work from [...]
Blue Man, Marshmallows & Possibly Some Blue Trees
A visit with Houston Native Shane Andries First came the trees, as in Konstantin Dimopoulis’ fabulous public art...
Steve Brudniak: The Science of Surrealism
Comte de Lautréamont was a 19th-century poet whose famously cryptic line – “beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” – was adopted as one of Surrealism’s aesthetic credos. Nearly sixty years later, André Breton, one of the founders [...]
Clarissa Tossin at Window into Houston & Sicardi Gallery
A common undergraduate exercise for architecture and design students tasks them with going out and taking pictures of “things used as other things.” Jack Lemmon’s character in The Apartment famously used a tennis racket to strain pasta, and I not so famously use an old sewing table [...]
No Paint at Gallery Sonja Roesch
In the 1970s and 80s modern land art was in its infancy, the steel industry was at its peak, and holograms were stunningly cool. No Paint at Gallery Sonja Roesch features a group of six artists whose art practices stem from this era with surprising relevancy and impeccable curation [...]
Kon-Tiki
Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s 8,000-kilometer voyage across the Pacific Ocean on the balsa raft Kon-Tiki in 1947 stands as one of the greatest post-World War II feats of exploration, and cemented his standing as a legendary adventurer. Heyerdahl’s book about his experience became a bestseller. It was published in 1948 [...]
Priscilla Queen of the Desert The Musical
It doesn’t matter that the plot is minimal, that the music is loud, or that the acting is...
Kristen Cochran
Kristen Cochran wants to speak in tongues. This might not be apparent at first, health but as you...
Review: Fela!
Raucous and defiant, electrifying and exhilarating, Fela! is a very different musical, blending a wide variety of attitudes and moods, sometimes angry, sometimes coy, sometimes soothing, sometimes sexy, sometimes groping for the mysterious and spiritual. Sprouting from the hybrid Afrobeat songs (jazz, funk, highlife, traditional Yoruban chants [...]