Weekend Event Planner

These are the 10 best things to do in Dallas this weekend

This weekend around Dallas will be heavy on events from local groups, with one big notable exception. There will be a national tour of a Broadway musical, a film festival, cirque performers, two symphony concerts, a local theater production, a preview of the new Texas Rangers team, a new art exhibition, a Japanese drumming group, and an opera concert featuring all female conductors.

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, January 26

Denton Black Film Festival
The Denton Black Film Festival allows guests to immerse themselves in some of the best artistic showcases of Black cinema, music, spoken word, art, and more. The festival, running through Sunday, will take place at multiple venues around Denton, including Campus Theater, Alamo Drafthouse, Denton Civic Center, and more. They will also offer a virtual option from January 29 - February 5.

Broadway Dallas presents Pretty Woman: The Musical
Based on one of Hollywood’s most beloved romantic stories of all time, Pretty Woman: The Musical springs to life with a powerhouse creative team led by two-time Tony Award-winning director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell. The production, featuring an original score by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance and a book by the movie’s director, Garry Marshall, and screenwriter, J. F. Lawton, the production runs through February 5 at the Music Hall at Fair Park.

Cirque Italia presents Water Circus
Cirque Italia presents Water Circus, featuring a stage that holds 35,000 gallons of water over which performers make dazzling moves, thrilling the audience with every feat. The event, taking place through Sunday, will be located in a tent in the parking lot of the Grand Prairie Premium Outlets.

Friday, January 27

Dallas Symphony Orchestra presents "Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto"
Conductor Karina Canellakis returns to the Meyerson Symphony Center stage to present Dvořák’s orchestral poem, The Wood Dove, a dark work focused on a woman who poisoned her husband to marry another man. Also on the program will be rising violin star Randall Goosby, joining the Dallas Symphony to perform Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D Major; and Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra. There will be three performances through Sunday.

The Core Theatre presents Every Livin' Soul
In Every Livin' Soul, a widowed farm woman struggles to fund her gifted son’s college education while simultaneously keeping the family farm afloat, a daunting task in depression-era America. A mysterious stranger comes begging for a meal, bringing hope, encouragement, and more than his fair share of danger. The production runs through February 26 at The Core Theatre in Richardson.

Saturday, January 28

Texas Rangers Fan Fest
With the Cowboys - boo hoo - now out of the playoffs, the revamped Texas Rangers can take centerstage in Arlington again. The annual Fan Fest at Globe Life Field will feature autograph sessions with current Rangers players and alumni; interactive Q&A sessions with Rangers executives, players, and announcers; on-field activities like running the bases, wiffle ball home run derby, bullpen fast pitch, and inflatables; and more.

Nasher Sculpture Center presents Mark di Suvero: "Steel Like Paper" opening day
Nasher Sculpture Center will present Mark di Suvero’s “Steel Like Paper,” a milestone exhibition of the sculptor’s more than six-decade career. The exhibition will survey di Suvero’s work, showing rarely-seen drawings and paintings along with small and moderately scaled sculptures, as well as some of the artist’s first forays into working at a large scale. The exhibition will remain on display through August 27.

Coppell Arts Center presents San Jose Taiko
Inspired by traditional Japanese drumming, San Jose Taiko performers express the beauty and harmony of the human spirit though the voice of taiko. All compositions performed by SJT are written or arranged by members of the group. They will also put on an interactive educational program at 1 pm, presenting the company's basic philosophical principles and engaging the students to actively participate in its high-action demonstration. Both events will be at Coppell Arts Center.

The Dallas Opera presents Hart Institute for Women Conductors Showcase Concert
Four of opera’s most brilliant young conductors - Celia Llácer Carbonell, Yuwon Kim, Blair Salter, and Anna Sułkowska-Migoń - are front and center for an evening of opera selections, sung by some of the country’s top singers and featuring The Dallas Opera Orchestra. Selections for the concert, taking place at Winspear Opera House, will include Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Bizet’s Carmen, Puccini’s Tosca, and Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking.

Sunday, January 29

Lone Star Wind Orchestra presents Rhapsodies in Blue
Shades of blue representing Earth and one of Gershwin’s most iconic works are celebrated as the Lone Star Wind Orchestra presents "Rhapsodies in Blue." Under the direction of LSWO Music Director Eugene Migliaro Corporon, the three-part concert will feature a new multimedia experience of Julie Giroux’s Symphony No. 6 The Blue Marble, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue featuring pianist Aaron Kurz, and a performance of American composer Frank Ticheli’s work, Blue Shades. The concert will be at Eisemann Center for Performing Arts in Richardson.

Photo by Matthew Murphy

Pretty Woman: The Musical runs at the Music Hall at Fair Park through February 5.

festivals film event-planner theater music symphony sports kids families dance galleries opera

Movie Review

Lazy 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' remake hooks nothing but nostalgia

Photo by Brook Rushton

Sarah Pidgeon, Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

When the original I Know What You Did Last Summer came out in 1997, it was riding the coattails of Scream, which came out in 1996. Like that film, it featured hot young actors of the time, albeit with a story that was much more standard than the inventive Scream. Still, it made enough of an impact for some studio executive to think it was worth reviving nearly 30 years later with its own legacy-quel.

In the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, a group of five high school friends - Danica (Madelyn Cline), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) - have reunited at the engagement party for Danica and Teddy on the 4th of July. While on an impromptu trip to watch fireworks on a twisty road in the nearby hills, Teddy goofs off in the middle of the road, causing a truck to swerve and drive off the cliff.

A year later, having sworn to each other to not speak of the accident to anybody, they start getting stalked by a mysterious person in a fisherman’s slicker carrying a hook. With Teddy’s rich father, Grant (Billy Campbell), actively trying to cover up what his son did (as well as the fallout), it’s up to the group to figure out who is coming after them and how to stop that person.

Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and co-written by Sam Lansky, the film doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel; in fact, it barely builds something that can roll. It might just be the laziest and most incompetent attempt to capitalize on an existing piece of intellectual property. There is almost zero effort put into establishing a connection between the members of the friend group, making them feel like strangers for the entire film.

It doesn’t help that the young male actors in the film - which grows to include Wyatt (Joshua Orpin), a new fiance for Danica - serve no purpose other than to be generically good-looking. The most impactful of the men in the film is the returning Freddie Prinze, Jr., who - along with Jennifer Love Hewitt - has his old character from the first two films shoehorned into the new story. The filmmakers undercut any good feelings from their return by giving them hardly anything to do and then having Hewitt deliver the line, “Nostalgia is overrated.”

The film as a whole never has a sense of momentum. The inciting incident is so tame - they even attempt to save the driver before the truck goes off the cliff - that the guilt they feel and the anger of the person going after them doesn’t feel warranted. Once the attacks start, it is shocking at how low-energy the sequences are, providing no sense of suspense or thrills. The filmmakers resort to the lamest of horror movie tropes, turning the film into a paint-by-numbers affair.

Cline (one of the stars of Netflix’s Outer Banks) and Wonders (The Studio on Apple TV+, Bodies Bodies Bodies) are the clear stars of the film, but their characters are made into inert scream queens, negating any acting talent they possess. Hauer-King, Withers, and Pidgeon don’t bring anything interesting to their characters, existing merely to have someone else for the killer to go after.

Even the worst films can have some kind of redeeming value if you look hard enough, but the only thing I Know What You Did Last Summer has to offer is that it becomes so comically bad by the end that you can’t help but laugh at its ineptitude. Both fans of the original and fans of horror movies in general will feel cheated by the experience.

---

I Know What You Did Last Summer opens in theaters on July 18.

movies film