Weekend event planner

These are the 15 best things to do in Dallas this weekend

This weekend around Dallas is packed full of events, headlined by an Irish festival several weeks ahead of St. Patrick's Day. There will also be six theater productions, including a national tour of a Broadway musical; three dance events, including one from everyone's favorite reality competition; a couple of well-known comedians; and more.

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, March 2

Dallas Symphony Orchestra presents Mendelssohn’s A Symphony Cantata
Paul McCreesh joins the Dallas Symphony Orchestra to conduct a grand spiritual concert including vocal soloists, the Dallas Symphony Chorus, and the Lay Family Organ. The concert will include Mendelssohn's Lobgesang (A Symphony Cantata), aka Symphony No. 2, and Hubert Parry's Blest Pair of Sirens. There will be three performances through Sunday at Meyerson Symphony Center.

Broadway at the Center presents On Your Feet! The Story of Emilio & Gloria Estefan
On Your Feet! is the inspiring true story about heart, heritage and two people who believed in their talent, and each other, to become an international sensation: Gloria and Emilio Estefan. Now their story is an exhilarating original musical featuring some of their most iconic songs, including "Rhythm is Gonna Get You," "Conga," "Get On Your Feet," "Don’t Want To Lose You Now," "1-2-3" and "Coming Out of the Dark." The production will have four performances through Saturday at Winspear Opera House.

Uptown Players presents Silver Foxes
Silver Foxes is a world premiere comedy play written by James Berg & Stan Zimmerman of The Golden Girls and directed by Michael Urie. It's about an ensemble of queer men who rescue their best friend from a homophobic assisted living facility. The three older men, plus their buddy’s younger Twink lover, navigate stray cats, online hook up sites, and the real estate ravenous lesbian couple next door to become a fabulous de facto family in an iconic mid-century Palm Springs house. The production runs through March 12 at Theatre Three.

Pocket Sandwich Theatre presents Murder at the Howard Johnson's
Is all fair in love? Even murder? That's the question posed by this light and funny suspense comedy about a love triangle in a Howard Johnson Motor Inn. The play presents a love triangle involving a woman, her lover, and her husband in three hilarious scenes. A wicked yet hilarious comedy, the question being, will all survive this fiasco? The production runs through March 25 at Pocket Sandwich Theatre in Carrollton.

Dancing with the Stars Live
America’s favorite dance show is back on tour. Audiences can see the ballroom brought to life in this brand-new production featuring favorite Dancing with the Stars pros, plus special guest stars. There will be dazzling routines in every style, jaw-dropping talent, and non-stop entertainment. The event will be at Texas Trust CU Theatre in Grand Prairie.

Friday, March 3

North Texas Irish Festival
One of the largest Irish festivals in the U.S., the North Texas Irish Festival is a family-friendly event featuring live music, dancing, storytelling, chef demonstrations, and more on multiple indoor and outdoor stages. Attendees will also enjoy horse shows, sheepherding demonstrations, beer and whiskey tastings, genealogy research opportunities, animal rescue groups, shopping, child-friendly entertainment, and free arts and crafts for the kids. The festival takes place through Sunday at Fair Park.

Bruce Wood Dance presents Wood / Shop
Bruce Wood Dance will present new works by Company dancers in their acclaimed Wood/Shop. The production will highlight new works by company dancers Claude Alexander III, Jaime Borkan, Alex Brown, Kevyn Butler, Sofia Downing, Weaver Rhodes, Megan Storey, Elliott Trahan, Cole Vernon, and Seth York. There will be performances on both Friday and Saturday at Bruce Wood Dance Gallery.

Taylor Tomlinson: The Have It All Tour
Taylor Tomlinson is too funny to be in her twenties. Her perspective possesses a degree of wisdom that’s typically earned with age. Focusing exclusively on Taylor’s old-soul clarity is tempting, but what makes Taylor stand out isn’t just that she seems too young to understand youth so well. It’s that she combines that vision with on-the-nose immediacy that can only come with still living in the moments being lampooned. She'll perform five times through Sunday at Majestic Theatre.

Improv Addison presents Craig Ferguson
Craig Ferguson is an actor, writer, producer, director, and comedian with a diverse career that encompasses film, television, and the stage. He is a bestselling author, has recorded numerous standup specials, and was the host of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which ran on CBS for 10 years. He'll perform five times through Sunday at Improv Addison.

TITAS/Dance Unbound presents Trinity Irish Dance Company
Always more than one expects, Irish step dancing is fusion of Ireland’s vibrant and longstanding dance-form. Adding elements of American innovation, Trinity Irish Dance Company dazzles audiences with its hard-driving percussive power, aerial grace and lightning-fast agility. The company expands whatever notions audiences may have about Irish dance ... revealing its limitless possibilities. They'll perform on both Friday and Saturday at Moody Performance Hall.

Potted Potter: The Unauthorized Harry Experience
Potted Potter takes on the ultimate challenge of condensing all seven Harry Potter books (and a real-life game of Quidditch) into 70 hilarious minutes. The production has been updated with a refreshed set design, upgraded illusions, and all the latest hilarious insights into the wonderful world of all thing Hogwarts. It includes favorite characters, a special appearance from a fire-breathing dragon, endless costumes, jokes, songs, props, and a generous helping of Hogwarts magic plus lots of mayhem. There will be six performances through Sunday at Wyly Theatre.

Saturday, March 4

Coppell Arts Center presents Dragons and Mythical Beasts
Dragons and Mythical Beasts unveils myriad dark secrets where audiences can come face to face with some of the most magnificent monsters and terrifying beasts ever to walk the earth. Discover the colossal Stone Troll, the mysterious Indrik and Japanese Baku; the Tooth Fairy (not as sweet as you’d think), an adorable Unicorn, and majestic Griffin. There will be two performances at Coppell Arts Center.

Teatro Dallas presents Nuevo Mundo
Teatro Dallas will present its first-ever bilingual New Works festival, Nuevo Mundo. In celebration of the fresh new voices and performance styles blossoming across the global south, Nuevo Mundo features three emerging directors and the plays they have selected for an animated, staged reading series. Taking place weekly over three weeks, the festival kicks off on Saturday with Choke by Emilio Infante at Latino Cultural Center.

Wizkid in concert
The genre of Afrobeats, which generally refers to popular music from West Africa, may not be familiar to a lot of people in the United States, but Wizkid is helping to change that. The Nigerian singer has had a steady rise in the music industry over the past decade or so, ultimately working with artists as big as Drake and Beyoncé, and winning a Grammy for the song "Brown Skin Girl" to boot. He'll perform at The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory in support of his 2022 album, More Love, Less Ego.

Sunday, March 5

The Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas closings
Sunday will be the final day to view two exhibitions at the Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas. "Phoenix Rising: Xu Bing and the Art of Resilience" highlights a celebrated work, Bronze Phoenix 2016 (Feng and Huang), complementing it with five works from the Crow Museum’s Chinese jade collection that also celebrate the revered phoenix. "Cast: Molding a New Museum for UT Dallas" looks to the future, providing an exclusive first look at the Crow Museum’s second location on the campus of UT Dallas in Richardson.

Photo by Todd Rosenberg

Comedian Taylor Tomlinson will perform at Majestic Theatre, March 3-5.

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Movie Review

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson face pre-marriage jitters in The Drama

Photo courtesy of A24

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama.

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya will be seen together a lot at the movies in 2026, with mega-films like The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three coming out later in the year. But fans can get a much more intimate look at the two stars in a film that offers a unique take on relationship struggles, The Drama.

Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) are a New York couple who are engaged to be married. After a quick-but-effective montage of their courtship, the story joins them as they are just days away from their wedding. As they get all the details like music, flowers, and food finalized, a visit to the caterer with married friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) proves fateful.

A few too many drinks leads to each member of the group deciding to divulge the worst thing they’ve ever done. While each story is slightly shocking, Emma’s takes the cake, so much so that Charlie starts to question their relationship. As they get closer to the wedding date, Charlie finds it increasingly difficult to get beyond Emma’s revelation, with each real or imagined conversation threatening to derail their previously tight bond.

Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, the film is provocative, funny, and cringey as it tries to get to the center of human dynamics. Charlie, Rachel, and Mike have starkly different reactions to Emma’s story, and the way those play out over the course of the film provides, well, the drama. The harder Charlie tries to justify Emma’s past, the more his underlying feelings start to eat at him, causing friction not just between him and Emma, but in other parts of his life, as well.

Strangely, especially for a character played by Zendaya, Emma recedes more than expected. Her explanations for her previous actions are timid at best, and she mostly seems to be waiting for Charlie to forgive her instead of questioning why she needs forgiveness. Borgli favors the male side of the equation, and in so doing he doesn’t dig as deep into the root of the issue as he could have.

Still, the downward spiral at the center of the story has a propulsive nature to it, and each successive step proves to be both hard to watch and impossible to turn away from. It also helps that Borgli manages the tone well, keeping interactions between characters relatively light so that the film doesn’t turn into one like Marriage Story.

Pattinson, who gets to use his own British accent for once, put on an interesting performance that is much better than his last two roles in Mickey 17 and Die My Love. He has good chemistry with Zendaya, who manages to shine despite being laden with a role that doesn’t play entirely to her strengths. Haim and Athie do good work in small roles, while Hailey Grace and Hannah Gross make an impact in brief appearances.

The situation in which Emma and Charlie find themselves in The Drama is not one to be wished on anyone, but it’s presented well by Borgli, keeping tensions high for the bulk of the film. Despite the two main characters not given completely equal footing, the story finds a way to get to a satisfactory ending.

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The Drama opens in theaters on April 3.

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