Weekend Event Planner

These are the 12 best things to do in Dallas this weekend

Garth Brooks is headlining RodeoHouston 2018, but there's a long list of acts that could follow.

Courtesy photo

This weekend around Dallas is dominated by huge events, with the occasional smaller one for balance. Among the larger ones are a trio of big-name concerts, including a country music superstar, a national tour of a Broadway musical, a concert featuring a favorite Disney film, a well-known comedian, fighting in the octagon, and YouTubers showing off some great tricks.

Below are the best ways to spend your precious free time this weekend. Want more options? Lucky for you, we have a much longer list of the city's best events.

Thursday, July 28

A.R. Rahman in concert
A two-time Academy Award winner and five-time nominee, A.R. Rahman is popularly known as the man who has redefined contemporary Indian music. Rahman has sold more than 150 million copies of his work comprising of music from more than 100 film soundtracks and albums across over half a dozen languages, including landmark scores such as Roja, Bombay, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, and more. The concert will be at The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory in Irving.

AT&T Performing Arts Center presents The Prom
The Prom is a new musical comedy about big Broadway stars on a mission to change the world and a love that unites them all. Four Broadway actors lament their days of fame as they travel to the conservative town of Edgewater, Indiana, to help a lesbian student banned from bringing her girlfriend to high school prom. The production will run through Sunday at Winspear Opera House.

Friday, July 29

Disney Concerts presents Encanto: The Sing-Along Film Concert Tour
Encanto, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Academy Award-winning film, comes to life in a concert event, featuring the entire feature-length film and an on-stage band celebrating all hit songs from the beloved soundtrack. The soundtrack features eight original songs by songwriter/composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, with an original score by composer Germaine Franco. The performance takes place at the Dos Equis Pavilion.

Joe Rogan: "The Sacred Clown" Tour
A standup comedian for more than 20 years, Joe Rogan sells out theaters internationally with his inquisitive and intense comedic style. Rogan is host of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring long form conversations with guests that is one of the most popular comedy podcasts on iTunes. He'll perform at Majestic Theatre.

Theatre Frisco presents Something Rotten
Something Rotten is an outrageous, crowd-pleasing musical farce set in the 1590s that centers around Nick and Nigel Bottom, who are desperate to write a hit play but are stuck in the shadow of that Renaissance rockstar known as “The Bard.” When a local soothsayer foretells that the future of theater involves singing, dancing, and acting all at once, Nick and Nigel set out to write the world’s very first musical and hilarity ensues. The production runs through August 14 at Frisco Discovery Center.

Saturday, July 30

Avant Chamber Ballet presents "Dancer’s Choice"
Avant Chamber Ballet presents a brand new concept, "Dancer’s Choice," a performance that is dancer-created, -produced, and -performed. The performances will feature new works by company members Madelaine Boyce, Kaila Bryant, and Kaylee Skelton, plus classical and contemporary works that are meaningful to each dancer. There will be two performances on Saturday at Sammons Center for the Arts.

UFC 277
UFC returns to Dallas for the first time in almost four years, headlined by a women’s bantamweight championship rematch that will see Julianna Peña go for her first successful title defense against former titleholder and current women’s featherweight champion Amanda Nunes. The co-main event will feature the crowning of an interim flyweight champion when former titleholder Brandon Moreno runs it back with Kai Kara-France. The event takes place at American Airlines Center.

The #IMOMSOHARD Getaway Tour
#IMOMSOHARD is a web series by real-life best friends, comedians, and moms Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedley. With a camera, two husbands, a babysitter, and bottomless mimosas, Kristin and Jen decided to speak openly to their community of 2 million followers about their fears and failures, proving that the only way to survive motherhood is through laughter and friendship. The event will be at Majestic Theatre.

Garth Brooks in concert
For over 30 years, Garth Brooks has remained one of the superstars of country music, even when he took a decade off to devote time to his family. He's released a handful of albums since coming back in 2014, including 2020's Fun, but fans will mostly be there for the greatest hits and the spectacular show by country's consummate entertainer. This will be Garth's first time in Dallas-Fort Worth in seven years and his first time headlining AT&T Stadium in Arlington.

Dallas Symphony Orchestra presents An Evening with Veronica Swift
With a repertoire running the gamut from swing to bebop to the Great American Songbook, Veronica Swift is a young but fully fledged star on the international jazz scene. Boasting a clear and lilting tone and radiant stage presence, she is also a master of rigorous vocal techniques like vocalese and scat. Swift will perform selections from her 2021 album, This Bitter Earth, along with additional jazz standards, rock classics, and more. The concert will be at Meyerson Symphony Center.

Sunday, July 31

Dude Perfect: "That's Happy"
Dude Perfect, the Frisco-based YouTube stars, will perform at American Airlines Center as part of their "That's Happy" tour. Fans will see the Dudes compete in even bigger battles, tell their laugh-out-loud stories, and get a little messy in the process. The tour will feature some of the most popular segments from their award-winning “Overtime” series like Cool not Cool and Wheel Unfortunate with Ned Forrester, and new fan-favorite segments like Get Crafty and Top 10 are in the works as well.

Third Eye Blind in concert
Alt-rock band Third Eye Blind rode the wave of the genre's boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, becoming big thanks to hits like "Semi-Charmed Life," "How's It Going to Be," "Jumper," and "Never Let You Go." They haven't reached those heights since, although they're still out there delivering for their loyal fans, releasing their seventh album, Our Bande Apart, in 2021. They'll play at Dos Equis Pavilion.

Garth Brooks will play at AT&T Stadium on July 30.

Courtesy photo

Garth Brooks will play at AT&T Stadium on July 30.

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Movie review

Over-the-top The Bride! makes other Frankenstein movies seem subtle

Photo by Niko Tavernise

Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in The Bride!.

The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.

Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.

After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.

It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.

One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.

Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.

Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.

Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.

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The Bride! is now playing in theaters.

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