Weekend Event Planner

Hadestown jazzes up the 13 best things to do in Dallas this weekend

Performing arts will once again dominate the slate of events in and around Dallas this weekend, with five theater productions, two comedians, a chamber opera, a full-scale opera, and a dance production. There will also be two different festivals and a concert to celebrate a historic music venue.

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

Thursday, February 27

Dallas Theater Center presents Primary Trust
Kenneth lives in a small town in upstate New York. For 15 years his life has been the same: by day, he works at a bookstore, in the evening, he drinks mai tais with his friend Bert. When the bookstore shuts down, Kenneth is forced out of his comfort zone to face a world he has long avoided - with transformative and heartwarming results. Performances of Primary Trust, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, run through March 23 at Bryant Hall in the Kalita Humphreys Theater complex.

Undermain Theatre presents Box
Part magic show, part historical speculation, part romantic drama, Box explores the harrowing story of Henry Box Brown, the abolitionist lecturer and early magician who escaped slavery by mailing himself to freedom and went on to become a famed magician on the London stage. Using actual magic, the world premiere imagines an unwritten chapter in the story of one of history’s most overlooked folk heroes. The production runs through March 24 at Undermain Theatre.

Broadway Dallas presents Hadestown
Hadestown intertwines two mythic tales - that of young dreamers Orpheus and Eurydice, and that of King Hades and his wife Persephone - as it invites the audience on a hell-raising journey to the underworld and back. Singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell’s beguiling melodies and director Rachel Chavkin’s poetic imagination pit industry against nature, doubt against faith, and fear against love. The national tour of the jazzy Tony Award-winning musical runs through Sunday at the Music Hall at Fair Park.

Live With Jake Shane
Jake Shane is an influencer and comedian who became well-known for his viral TikTok videos featuring humorous re-enactments of historical events. In 2023, he was nominated for a Streamy Award and appeared on TikTok's inaugural LGBTQ+ Pride Visionary Voices List and on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. He'll perform at Majestic Theatre.

Friday, February 28

North Texas Irish Festival
The North Texas Irish Festival celebrates the best in music, dance, food and spirits, storytelling, art, and more originating in the Emerald Isle. The festival features 10 stages of live music, Irish step dancing, chef demonstrations and more. Guests will also enjoy beer and whiskey tastings, shopping, horse shows, sheepherding demonstrations, animal rescue groups, child-friendly entertainment, and arts and crafts for the kids. The festival takes place through Sunday at Fair Park.

Verdigris Ensemble presents Song From The Uproar: The Lives And Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt
In Song From The Uproar: The Lives And Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, composer Missy Mazzoli brings to life the remarkable journey of Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss explorer who abandoned European privilege to roam the Sahara as a Sufi mystic. Through a blend of live instruments and electronics, the chamber opera illuminates the tensions between opposing forces - man and woman, water and sand, Europe and Africa. The production will have three performances through Sunday at Theatre Three.

The Dallas Opera presents La bohème
Hungry, cold, broke, and deliriously in love, the artists in Puccini’s masterpiece La bohème break hearts over and over again each time it is performed, with pulses quickening as Rodolfo lights Mimì’s candle anew. The Dallas Opera’s period production returns with a fresh cast of some of opera’s brightest rising stars, transporting audiences to the cafés and corridors of Paris’s Latin Quarter as tragedy hovers nearby. The production will have five performances through March 9 at Winspear Opera House.

Teatro Dallas presents Nuevo Mundo (A New Directors Festival)
The final weekend of Teatro Dallas' Nuevo Mundo, a festival that incubates new directors and playwrights, will feature a semi-devised premiere piece called In the Beginning, created by Gerald Taylor II under the mentorship of Lauren Leblanc. In a world where everything feels like it is ending, sometimes the answer lies at the start. The production, an exploration of several creation myths from around the world told by four storytellers, will have three performances through Sunday at Latino Cultural Center.

Texas Ballet Theater presents International Woman
In a celebration of female creativity and choreography, Texas Ballet Theater presents International Woman, an evening dedicated entirely to works by female choreographers. Highlights include Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's Shibuya Blues, an exploration of modern life and dance; Lamentation Variations, inspired by Martha Graham's elegy in movement; Martha Graham’s whimsical Maple Leaf Rag; and Natalie Weir’s vibrant Jabula, a celebration of motion and dance through the music of Hans Zimmer’s The Power of One. There will be four performances through Sunday at Wyly Theatre.

Majestic Theatre presents Luenell
Luenell is a force of nature best known for her role as the “hooker with the heart of gold” in Borat. She's also appeared in feature films like I Hate You Dad with Adam Sandler and Leighton Meester and Think Like a Man with Arielle Kebell and Meagan Good, as well as TV shows like The Middle and Always Sunny In Philadelphia. She'll perform for one night only at Majestic Theatre.

Saturday, March 1

Kitchen Dog Theater presents New Works Festival Staged Reading Series: Bad Books
When a troubled teen is given a controversial book, his mother visits the local library to discuss “appropriate” reading material with the librarian. However, their reasonable discussion quickly turns into a heated confrontation, sparking a dramatic chain reaction of unexpected consequences. With both heartbreak and humor, playwright Sharyn Rothstein offers compassion and empathy as an antidote to the deep debates that divide us. Part of Kitchen Dog Theater's Staged Reading Series, the production will be at Kitchen Dog Theater's new location in Expo Park.

City of Carrollton presents TEXFest
The 10th annual TEXFest is a celebration of Texas Independence Day. The Texas-sized festival features craft beer, good grub, and local artists performing Texas music. Visitors can ride on a mechanical bull, participate in two-stepping and lawn games, and more. The festival takes place in Historic Downtown Carrollton.

Sunday, March 2

Longhorn Jubilee featuring Toadies
To celebrate Longhorn Ballroom’s 75th anniversary, the venue will host a series of events to honor the iconic room's past, present, and future. Dubbed the Longhorn Jubilee, the all-genre-encompassing events will unfold both inside the Ballroom and outside in the Courtyard combining music with food trucks, local vendors, brand activations, and more. The inaugural event takes on Texas Independence Day, featuring performances by Toadies, The Band of Heathens, Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys, and more.

Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

Hadestown will play at the Music Hall at Fair Park through March 2.

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Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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