Static Wit
Like the Corot paintings that hung in a proper Victorian drawing room, the stage picture presented in Main Street Theater’s production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband is breathtakingly lovely. It’s also, like a portrait, almost completely static. Despite the pleasure of Wilde’s quick wit and the timeless appeal of…
Fighting Words
The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howard’s End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the form; now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates the genre with yet more fresh…
Tunnel Vision
It’s impossible to capture on the printed page the anticipatory thrill of watching Sylvester Stallone handle rapid-fire dialogue: the rumbling basso voice, the twisted mouth valiantly trying to wrap itself around a stream of words, the consonants and vowels hurling forward like a toppled barrel of oranges. Will any of…
In The Rough
The city of Lake Jackson loves its trees, especially the gnarled, thick-trunked live oaks bearded with Spanish moss that dominate its landscape. Such an oak is stamped on the city’s stationery and adorns a welcoming sign on the outskirts of town. When Alden Dow, architect son of the founder of…
Crashing the Grand Old Party
At 9:45 a.m., congressional candidate Dolly Madison McKenna looks like she’s died and gone to heaven. She’s on the second stop of her “Cost of Ken Bentsen Day,” a mission designed to show that her Democratic opponent is a cog in Big Government, which mindlessly crushes small businesses. And here…
The Insider
Let’s Make a Bet “This,” says lawyer David Berg, “is why the public hates lawyers.” Last week, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments jointly declared victory. Just before a Texas state jury was to decide a fraud case that Samsung had filed against TI, the two companies settled that claim –…
It Was Like This
The Houston Trial Lawyers Foundation threw its second annual First Amendment Awards banquet the other night at the Houstonian. It was one of those self-congratulatory affairs that always makes me a little uneasy — you know, a lot of plaintiff’s lawyers and journalists gathered in one room, wining and dining…
Letters
Missing Jow In your November 21 edition, you very kindly informed us about your three “new film guys.” However, I did not see anything about what happened to your “previous film guy,” Joe Leydon. Will you still be running his most excellent reviews? Kelly Laskosky Houston Editor’s reply: The Press…
Press Picks
thursday december 5 I-45 blues A few Best Of issues back, we named the Pierce Elevated the Best Road to Drive On, partly in appreciation of the bumps experienced at freeway speeds. The thrill is no more, since as of 12:01 a.m. today and for the next seven months that…
South of the Sabine
For close to two decades, the venerable Sunset Tea Room just off Kirby was the venue of choice for the sort of Houstonians who, at other times, would likely be found eating at the country club. The strip center space wasn’t all that evident unless you knew it was there,…
Dish
Sadler Moves On Bill Sadler has done it again. Early last month, the restaurant entrepreneur who built the River Cafe into a success, and then sold it, passed ownership of his Cafe Noche into the hands of his longtime chef Alan Mallett. Sadler had made his neo-regional Mexican outpost on…
Digging the Delta
The Mississippi Delta, birthplace of the blues — the trunk from which most worth-a-damn American popular music branched — has been out of the mainstream spotlight for years. It’s been out of the spotlight since the Depression, in fact, when second- and third-generation players began to migrate to the urban…
Rush to Judgment
Sanctimonious intent and senseless experimentation are the lethal ingredients in some of rock’s deadliest moments, and at one time or another, Rush has epitomized both. Few acts have provoked more delight and more disgust, more admiration and more irritation, more euphoria and more nausea, than this durable Canadian power trio…
Static
Ballroom bane… The International Ballroom and Pace Concerts didn’t win themselves a lot of fans with their handling of Soundgarden’s November 26 performance. The problem wasn’t the show; it was the fact that a couple of hundred people who had purchased tickets from legitimate ticket outlets weren’t allowed in to…
Rotation
Mazzy Star Among My Swan Capitol All the music on Among My Swan sounds the same to me — post-alternative lullabies for people probably better off asleep. Granted, Mazzy Star’s much-lauded Hope Sandoval has a pretty voice, but I’ve got a breeze outside my window that sounds nice as well,…
Right Number
The bloodhound’s name was Beauregard, and the phone number down at the used car lot was BR5-49. If those things make you smile, your secret is out: You were a Hee Haw fan. Whether you saw it as a cunning satire of everything that drove you nuts or a proud…
S R O
Cat of a Different Color It’s fair to say that there are more poor productions of Tennessee Williams’s plays than there are good ones, in part because the writer’s elegance can too easily become camp in the hands of inexperienced directors. But one of the rare things about Williams’s best…