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

Faces of Death returns with modern twist on cult horror film

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy - in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks - is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

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