Weekend Event Planner

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

It is a huge weekend around Dallas, headlined by the return of The Boss after seven years. By sheer volume, though, local theater will give him a run for your money, with no fewer than eight separate productions starting their runs. There will also be a special concert with a jazz legend, a new opera production, a well-known comedian, highly entertaining basketball, a ballet production, and a concert from indie rock veterans.

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, February 9

Photo courtesy of Harlem Globetrotters

Harlem Globetrotters will play at American Airlines Center on February 11.

Dallas Theater Center presents Native Gardens
In the contemporary comedy Native Gardens, cultures and gardens clash, turning well-intentioned neighbors into feuding enemies. Pablo, a rising attorney, and doctoral candidate Tania, his very pregnant wife, have just purchased a home next to Frank and Virginia, a well-established D.C. couple with a prize-worthy English garden. But an impending barbecue for Pablo’s colleagues and a delicate disagreement over a long-standing fence line soon spiral into an all-out border dispute, exposing both couples’ notions of race, taste, class, and privilege. The production runs through February 26 at Kalita Humphreys Theater.

Plague Mask Players presents Romeo & Juliet
This version of William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet features a widower and widow who fall in love in spite of their adult children’s feud. The production by Plague Mask Players will focus on love and loss, grief and joy, and the lengths one will go to hang onto that love in the midst of the storms of life. The production runs through February 18 at Bath House Cultural Center.

Dallas Symphony Orchestra presents Terence Blanchard featuring E-Collective and Turtle Island String Quartet
Trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard has been a consistent artistic force for making powerful musical statements concerning pivotal moments in American culture – past and present. With his current quintet The E-Collective, Blanchard has now released three acclaimed albums on Blue Note Records. Prior to the concert at the Meyerson Symphony Center, Blanchard will participate in a free conversation about his career and share his insights on equity, diversity, and inclusion with moderator Laura Harris.

Bishop Arts Theatre Center presents The 1619 Project: One-Act Festival
In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia with a cargo of 20-30 enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. Bishop Arts Theatre Center has commissioned nine playwrights to pen a one-act play, no longer than 20 minutes, based on Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project. This one-act festival will weave together stories that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America. The production runs through February 26 at Bishop Arts Theater Center.

Friday, February 10

Dallas Children's Theater presents Endlings
Dallas Children's Theater will present the final production of Cry Havoc Theater Company, Endlings. In its eight-year history in Dallas, the teen theater company has been celebrated for putting young artists in the lead as creators and actors of bold art that disrupts expectations and shakes up old, entrenched conversations. Endlings is a thought-provoking play that tackles climate change, social justice, grief, the pandemic, art, and much more with frank, youthful honesty. The production runs through February 19 at Rosewood Center for Family Arts.

The Dallas Opera presents Das Rheingold
From the primordial depths of the Rhine to the glittering turrets of Valhalla - the world of the Teutonic gods is in chaos. The evil Alberich steals the magic gold from errant water sprites and forges it into a ring that gives the wearer unfathomable power. Now, everyone wants it - but anyone who gets it is cursed. Betrayal, cheating, illicit love, and murder…it’s all here in this first opera of Wagner’s iconic Ring Cycle. The production, sung in German with English supertitles, will have four performances through February 18 at Winspear Opera House.

Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band in concert
Rock legend Bruce Springsteen will put on his first concert in Dallas in seven years when he and The E Street Band play at American Airlines Center. 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Springsteen's debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and this is Springsteen's first opportunity to play songs live from 2020's Letter to You, his first album with The E Street Band since 2014's High Hopes.

Repertory Company Theatre presents Ghost the Musical
Ghost the Musical is the new, revised version of the Broadway musical currently on tour across the world. Adapted from the hit film by its screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, Ghost the Musical follows Sam and Molly, a young couple whose connection takes a shocking turn after Sam's untimely death. Trapped between two worlds, Sam refuses to leave Molly when he learns she is in grave danger. Desperate to communicate with her, he turns to a storefront psychic, Oda Mae Brown, who helps him protect Molly and avenge his death. The production runs through February 19 at Repertory Company Theatre in Richardson.

Theatre Arlington presents Gypsy: A Musical Fable
Gypsy is the ultimate tale of an ambitious stage mother fighting for her daughters’ success – while secretly yearning for her own. Set all across America in the 1920s and '30s, when vaudeville was dying and burlesque was born, Arthur Laurents’ landmark show explores the world of two-bit show business with brass, humor, heart, and sophistication. The production runs through March 5 at Theatre Arlington.

Soul Rep Theatre Company presents Sexy Laundry
Armed with a copy of Sex for Dummies, Alice and Henry check themselves into a trendy spa hotel with a mission: to jump-start their 25-year marriage. Can they embrace all the wild suggestions Alice keeps pulling from her handy-dandy marriage-saving manual? Alice and Henry share their erotic fantasies, exchange recriminations, and take turns confessing the details of their mid-life crises as the play flips from comedic to serious and back again. The production runs through February 18 at Margo Jones Theatre.

Ochre House Theater presents JC Amate
Ochre House Theater will present the new and surreal comedy, JC Amate, about a lonely man who bends time and space with his beautiful origami animals. Audiences can step into his private world of mayhem and curiosity. Can he control what he creates? The production runs through February 25 at Ochre House Theater.

Hyena's presents Pauly Shore
Pauly Shore tasted stardom in the 1990s thanks to his MTV show Totally Pauly, as well as starring roles in films like Jury Duty, In the Army Now, Bio-Dome, Encino Man, Son In Law, and A Goofy Movie. Apart from actively touring the country with his stand-up comedy, Pauly is working on a documentary of his life that spans the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. He'll perform twice on Friday at Hyena's in Dallas.

Saturday, February 11

Harlem Globetrotters World Tour
The Harlem Globetrotters 2023 World Tour will feature favorite Globetrotter stars showcasing their amazing basketball skill, outrageous athleticism, and a non-stop LOL good time. The Globetrotters will go head-to-head against the Washington Generals, who will stop at nothing to try and defeat the world’s winningest team. The event will be at American Airlines Center.

Ballet North Texas presents Love Notes
Ballet North Texas presents Love Notes, a program that celebrates the innovative female voices of the art world and their perspective of what love is. Raw and visceral, compassionate and charmed, this performance will draw out the deepest meaning of what love is. There will be performances on Saturday and Sunday at Moody Performance Hall.

Sunday, February 12

Death Cab for Cutie in concert
Seems weird to think about it, but the rock band Death Cab for Cutie are now longtime veterans, having put out music for 25 years. Originally a side project for lead singer Ben Gibbard, the band has turned out to be the biggest part of his professional life, with 11 albums and counting, most recently 2022's Asphalt Meadows. They will play at The Factory in Deep Ellum.

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Movie Review

Film sequel Avatar: Fire and Ash is a technical and visual feast

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Oona Chaplin in Avatar: Fire and Ash.

For a series whose first two films made over $5 billion combined worldwide, Avatar has a curious lack of widespread cultural impact. The films seem to exist in a sort of vacuum, popping up for their run in theaters and then almost as quickly disappearing from the larger movie landscape. The third of five planned movies, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is finally being released three years after its predecessor, Avatar: The Way of Water.

The new film finds the main duo, human-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his native Na’vi wife, Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña), still living with the water-loving Metkayina clan led by Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). While Jake and Neytiri still play a big part, the focus shifts significantly to their two surviving children, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as two they’ve essentially adopted, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and Spider (Jack Champion).

Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who lives on in a fabricated Na’vi body, is still looking for revenge on Jake, and he finds help in the form of the Mangkwan Clan (aka the Ash People), led by Varang (Oona Chaplin). Quaritch’s access to human weapons and the Mangkwan’s desire for more power on the moon known as Pandora make them a nice match, and they team up to try to dominate the other tribes.

Aside from the story, the main point of making the films for writer/director James Cameron is showing off his considerable technical filmmaking prowess, and that is on full display right from the start. The characters zoom around both the air and sea on various creatures with which they’ve bonded, providing Cameron and his team with plenty of opportunities to put the audience right there with them. Cameron’s preferred viewing method of 3D makes the experience even more immersive, even if the high frame rate he uses makes some scenes look too realistic for their own good.

The story, as it has been in the first two films, is a mixed bag. Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver start off well, having Jake, Neytiri, and their kids continue mourning the death of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) in the previous film. The struggle for power provides an interesting setup, but Cameron and his team seem to drag out the conflict for much too long. This is the longest Avatar film yet, and you really start to feel it in the back half as the filmmakers add on a bunch of unnecessary elements.

Worse than the elongated story, though, is the hackneyed dialogue that Cameron, Jaffa, and Silver have come up with. Almost every main character is forced to spout lines that diminish the importance of the events around them. The writers seemingly couldn’t resist trying to throw in jokes despite them clashing with the tone of the scenes in which they’re said. Combined with the somewhat goofy nature of the Na’vi themselves (not to mention talking whales), the eye-rolling words detract from any excitement or emotion the story builds up.

A pre-movie behind-the-scenes short film shows how the actors act out every scene in performance capture suits, lending an authenticity to their performances. Still, some performers are better than others, with Saldaña, Worthington, and Lang standing out. It’s more than a little weird having Weaver play a 14-year-old girl, but it works relatively well. Those who actually get to show their real faces are collectively fine, but none of them elevate the film overall.

There are undoubtedly some Avatar superfans for which Fire and Ash will move the larger story forward in significant ways. For anyone else, though, the film is a demonstration of both the good and bad sides of Cameron. As he’s proven for 40 years, his visuals are (almost) beyond reproach, but the lack of a story that sticks with you long after you’ve left the theater keeps the film from being truly memorable.

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Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in theaters on December 19.

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