The dog days of summer are soon to come to an end, even if the weather doesn’t necessarily reflect that fact. Luckily, all of our best bets this week will help you beat the heat, as they are all in doors. We’ve got the return of a cut-short musical, the return of a popular horror film festival, and the return of a beloved art show. Keep reading below for these and our other picks for best bets.
Two friends turn a little laundromat into a honky tonk in Roger Bean’s Honky Tonk Laundry, which you can catch at Stages tonight, Thursday, August 7, at 7 p.m. The jukebox musical, which first opened in March 2020 before being cut short due to the pandemic after four performances, is back at The Gordy and features more than two dozen country songs, including The Chick’s “Wide Open Spaces,” Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” and Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Additional performances are scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays and August 12, 2 and 7 p.m. Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays through August 17. Tickets can be purchased here for $45 to $139.
You can get your summer scares over at Houston Marriott Westchase this weekend when the Houston Horror Film Fest returns on Friday, August 8, from 5 to 10 p.m. The three-day event will showcase hours of film screenings, including world premieres; more than 100 vendors and artists; and Q&As and meet and greets with celebrities like headliners Linda Blair and Malcolm McDowell and cast members from films like Terrifier and Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2. The festival continues Saturday, August 9, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday, August 10, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. with film screenings lasting until 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. You can view the film schedule here and the panel schedule here. Tickets are $50 for general admission each day or you can get a three-day pass for $70. You can purchase either here.
If you happened to be in the market for school supplies in the 1990s, you’ll remember the “bright pops of color and cuddly, big-eyed animal characters” of Lisa Frank, with their “fantastical illustrations featuring dolphins, unicorns, puppies, and kittens,” that adorned folders, notebooks, pencil pouches, and more. Though last year’s Glitter and Greed: The Lisa Frank Story showed Frank as “an extreme figure prone to emotional highs and lows and as a toxic, little-seen manager capable of making threats and outbursts,” her impact is undeniable. On Friday, August 8, from 7 to 11 p.m., you can enjoy the work of dozens of local artists, inspired by “the storied brand,” when Insomnia Gallery will present World of Color: Lisa Frank Art Show, all-ages-welcome, free celebration of the Queen of Color, at Hardy and Nance Studios.
The “best-known work” of “lyrical Southern writer” Elizabeth Spencer, is her 1960 novella The Light in the Piazza, a tale of “an upper-class American visiting Italy with her mentally disabled adult daughter, who becomes enamored of a young Italian man” originally published in The New Yorker. It is a “story of maternal responsibility and love, of emotional innocence and its consequences,” and on Friday, August 8, at 8 p.m., you can see the story – previously brought to life as a 1962 film starring Olivia de Havilland – in its Tony Award-winning musical form courtesy of The Sankofa Collective at Spring Street Studios. Performances will continue Saturday, August 9, at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, August 10, at 6 p.m.; and Monday, August 11, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available here for $30.
Thirty years after the debut of “one of the most recognizable reptilian figures in cultural history” in 1954, Godzilla “came roaring back to life” as Toho Studios looked to capitalize on “the box-office dominance of effects-laden Hollywood blockbusters in the eighties.” The second film of this Heisei era of Godzilla films is Godzilla vs. Biollante which has become “one of the weirdest movies in the genre” and “a firm franchise favorite for many fans.” On Monday, August 11, at 7:15 p.m., Buchanan’s Native Plants will present a screening of Kazuki Ōmori’s 1989 film, which “proudly displays some of the coolest special effects of the franchise, one of its strangest antagonists, and some great social commentary,” at River Oaks Theatre. Tickets to the screening can be purchased here for $15.
Brazos Bookstore will close its Summer of Hitchcock series on Wednesday, August 13, at 6:30 p.m. with a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho at River Oaks Theatre. Psycho – widely considered “to be the greatest horror movie ever made,” which “achieves the singular feat of scaring you to your soul without monsters or demons” – was adapted from a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, and you can join in on a pre-film book discussion with arts and culture writer Chris Vognar before the movie starts at 7:15 p.m. Tickets are still available here for $15. Though the showing is nearly sold out, you can catch another screening of Psycho (minus the pre-show discussion) on Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. Tickets for this screening can be purchased here for $12.
