I believe we are able to all agree that the worst time of yr is the long, dreary slog from post-holidays December to the primary bluebonnet blooms of March. This yr, we’re turning to exciting young novelists, up-and-coming A-listers, and nostalgic TV reboots to hold us through to spring. Our winter cultural lineup includes loads of reasons to get off the couch, including Cowboy Bob, a debut musical based on the infamous bank robber, and 80 for Brady, a tale of Houston Super Bowl LI starring Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, and Lily Tomlin. Regardless of your taste or preferred medium of entertainment, there’s no reason to be tired of this roster of happenings across the state.
Books
A Latest Race of Men From Heaven by Chaitali Sen (January 17, Sarabande Books)
Since my son was born earlier this yr, finding time to read has been a challenge. I used to spend entire Sunday afternoons getting lost in long, dense novels while curled up on the worn leather sofa at my favorite coffee shop (which sadly is probably not long for this world). Now I steal reading time here and there, normally very first thing within the morning before anyone else is awake. Short stories are perfect for this, because they mean you can dip into one other world within the span of fifteen or twenty minutes. (An Alice Munro collection is one in every of the one books on my nightstand that I’ve actually finished in the previous couple of months.) Next on my list: Chaitali Sen’s A Latest Race of Men From Heaven. The Austin creator’s understated, lyrical prose has drawn comparisons to the work of Michael Ondaatje and Jhumpa Lahiri. A Kirkus reviewer called her latest, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, “a study in restraint.” After a yr that felt just a little too unrestrained, what with Elon Musk shouting on Twitter, and Ted Cruz, well, being Ted Cruz, that sounds pretty great to me. — Rose Cahalan
Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny (March 7, Deep Vellum Publishing)
Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny teaches creative writing at UT–El Paso, but her latest novel Trash trains its view directly across the Rio Grande at Ciudad Juárez. The book weaves together the tales of three protagonists who frequent the identical municipal garbage dump: an educational who crosses the river to check the place and look after her aging tía, a feral teenager left there to fend for herself, and a trans sex employee who operates in the realm. It’s a portrait of a spot like nowhere else, just off the sting of Texas, and it reaches us because of two indispensable local institutions: Houston-based translator J.D. Pluecker, whose energy bridging Spanish- and English-language literary communities knows no borders, and Dallas publisher Deep Vellum, which, between a formidable recent run of recent releases and ongoing reissues of out-of-print experimental classics first published by Dalkey Archive, continues to construct a case for itself as the very best indie press in America. — Michael Agresta
Film, TV, and Music
The Last of Us (HBO, January 15)
HBO’s adaptation of the mega-popular video game series stars Pedro Pascal, whose temporary stint as a San Antonio middle schooler fails to qualify him as an official Texan, or so I’ve been told by my Texas Monthly editors. The show was also co-created by Craig Mazin, but I’ve also been informed that being college roommates with Ted Cruz doesn’t actually matter either. So for our narrowly defined purposes, the local appeal of The Last of Us lies in its setting: Just like the game, the series kicks off in Austin, where Pascal’s journeyman protagonist Joel resides when a mutant fungus outbreak suddenly transforms half of humanity into cannibalistic zombies. After all, The Last of Us was actually filmed in Alberta, Canada; some behind-the-scenes shots reveal how Alberta was transformed into Austin through clever signage and, presumably, by raising everyone’s rent 800 percent. But while the show’s not technically Texan either, if nothing else it would give us all of the cathartic pleasure of seeing our Bum Steer of the Yr recipient ravaged by sudden apocalypse, reasonably than the more gradual devastation it’s undergoing now. — Sean O’Neal
80 for Brady (Theaters, February 3)
There are 1,000,000 alternative ways Hollywood could make a movie about 2017’s Super Bowl LI, which was held in Houston. The sport was the best Super Bowl ever played, with a three-act structure that might make screenwriting expert Robert McKee weak within the knees—but many of the takes on Tom Brady’s finest on-field performance can be boring or clichéd. (No person must see a hagiography of the underdog-turned-GOAT, and definitely no one must see more blustering Boston sports bros depicted on screen.) Which is what makes 80 for Brady exciting: One thing we haven’t seen is a quartet of octogenarian Oscar-winning actresses in a goofy road comedy about their love of Brady and the Pats. Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, and Lily Tomlin are among the many finest talents cinema has ever produced, they usually’ve never appeared in a single movie together. I’m super psyched to see the 4 of them spend a pair hours goofing off in an absurd-looking comedy a few trip to Houston. Is there a greater approach to tell a story in regards to the best Super Bowl, and the best quarterback, than in a movie that offers 4 of our best actors the prospect to chop loose of their golden years? — Dan Solomon
Bruce Springsteen (Dallas, Houston, Austin; February 10, 14, 16)
When Bruce Springsteen announced that he’d spend six months of 2023 on the road, my only query was how lots of those shows I’d give you the chance to see. The reply, it turned out, was pretty satisfying: Three, if I felt like driving from Dallas to Houston to Austin within the span of six days, which I absolutely do. The Boss’s trio of Texas dates, starting in Dallas on February 10, heading to Houston on Valentine’s Day, and wrapping in Austin on February 16, come near the beginning of his run through the U.S. and Europe, and are an early favorite to make up the very best week I’ll have in 2023. A Latest Jersey legend, Springsteen’s obviously not a Texan, however the Garden State’s best musical export infuses his music with as much of a way of his home state as Willie Nelson does with Texas—which, as someone who appreciates home state pride, makes him sort of an honorary Texan to me. — D.S.
Party Down (Starz, February 24)
This never happens. Of all of the shows mourned that suffered an unjust early cancellation, what number of returned with a latest season nearly thirteen years later? The comedically acclaimed solid of Party Down, which follows a Los Angeles catering crew holding out for his or her big breaks, will once more don their little pink bow ties when the show returns with six latest episodes (centered, naturally, around an impromptu reunion) this February. Created by Austin TV author Rob Thomas and starring Jane Lynch, Ken Marino, Megan Mullally, Adam Scott, and Martin Starr, the unique seasons were critically lauded but had a notoriously small viewership—a typical formula for cult status. When you, like many, missed watching the primary time around, seasons one and two can be found to stream on Hulu before the show’s return. — Amanda O’Donnell
Jonathan Majors in Ant-Man: Quantumania (Theaters, February 17) and Creed III (Theaters, March 3)
It’s been the yr of Jonathan Majors since a minimum of 2020, when the Metroplex-bred actor landed his starring role in HBO’s regrettably short-lived Lovecraft Country. Majors has been verging on mainstream breakthrough for some time now; this yr brought him closer than ever, with a hosting gig on Saturday Night Live in the autumn and a lead role opposite Texas’s other perennial next big thing, Glen Powell, within the recent Devotion. But 2023 well and truly guarantees to launch Majors into the A-list finally. February finds Majors officially kicking off his multi-film run as Marvel’s Kang the Conqueror in the following Ant-Man movie, playing the final-boss supervillain to a latest generation of Avengers. And just a couple of weeks later, Majors will make one other high-profile heel turn in Creed III, squaring off because the hungry challenger to Michael B. Jordan’s boxing champ. Each movies are poised to be two of the yr’s biggest hits; together they promise to catapult Majors into the sort of international stardom we’ve been predicting for some time now. — S.O.
Performing Arts
Nina Simone: 4 Women (Russell Hill Rogers Theater, San Antonio, January 20–February 12)
Set on the day after the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Christina Ham’s powerful “play with music” imagines how Nina Simone’s civil-rights-era activism got here to life through her music as she writes a song at her home in Mount Vernon, Latest York. Ham, who also wrote 4 Little Girls: Birmingham 1963 and the musical Ruby: The Story of Ruby Bridges, had a private reason for setting this mess around the church bombing: though Ham grew up in Los Angeles, her mother attended Sixteenth Street Baptist when she was young. Framed by each traditional spirituals and Simone’s own incendiary songs, including “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” “Go Limp,” and “Mississippi Goddam,” 4 Women delves into the artist’s creative process and divulges how her music helped countless Black women on a journey of healing and transformation. — Amy Weaver Dorning
Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones with Dallas Symphony Orchestra (Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas, February 8)
The sensible jazz trumpeter–composer Terence Blanchard, who has scored most of Spike Lee’s movies since Jungle Fever in 1991 and was Oscar-nominated for the 2 most up-to-date, BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods, joins the DSO for a single performance of his recent opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which opened the 2021 season on the Metropolitan Opera as the primary opera by a Black composer ever staged there. Based on the memoir by Latest York Times columnist Charles Blow, it’s a searing story of Black experience in America, told through Blanchard’s music and a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, director of movies similar to Eve’s Bayou and Harriet. The solid is led by bass-baritone Nicholas Newson, a Rice University graduate and rising star who appeared within the Dallas Opera’s Rigoletto this fall. The following night, February 9, Blanchard will give a jazz concert on DSO’s stage together with his quintet the E-Collective and the string ensemble Turtle Island Quartet. — Marilyn Bailey
Das Rheingold (Dallas Opera, February 10–18)
It’s a great time to be a Richard Wagner fan in North Texas. Earlier this yr, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra announced that it might perform an ambitious concert version of the German composer’s four-opera, sixteen-hour Ring cycle in 2024. When you can’t wait that long, the Dallas Opera is staging a full-scale production of Das Rheingold, the primary a part of the cycle, in February. At a relatively short two and a half hours, Rheingold is the proper introduction to Wagner for opera newbies. And with a brand-new production by the Atlanta Opera’s Israeli-born artistic director, Tomer Zvulun, it also guarantees to draw the sort of hard-core Wagnerians who happily jet internationally to witness a latest staging. (They’re easily spotted—just search for the people wearing Viking helmets.) — Michael Hardy
Sarah’s Songs (The Long Center, Austin, February 10–12)
Following up Ballet Austin’s sixtieth-annual performance of The Nutcracker (and its most successful run ever of the vacation stalwart) is a trio of works that guarantees to be a dance-lover’s dream. Curated by artistic director Stephen Mills, the gathering of ballets includes George Balanchine’s romantic Serenade, with its Tchaikovsky rating and dreamy blue palette. Next is choreographer Jessica Lang’s contemporary ballet Garden Blue. Shot through with vivid color and featuring large moveable pieces resembling sculptures, this piece explores color, form, and movement, and features the onstage work of visual artist Sarah Crowner. Concluding the evening is the world premiere of Mills’ own I Am The Monument, set to the music of Philip Glass and dedicated to longtime Ballet Austin supporters Sarah and Dr. Ernest Butler, in celebration of their love of the humanities. — A.W.D.
“Songs of the Earth” Festival (Jones Hall, Houston, February 10–19)
Houston Symphony Orchestra is smartly packaging back-to-back programs as themed “festivals” that incorporate free community events. February’s series uses Gustav Mahler’s meditative masterpiece Song of the Earth as a springboard for several concert events that construct bridges between classical European and contemporary Asian composers. Latest music director Juraj Valčuha conducts the Mahler February 10–12, with world-renowned vocalists Sasha Cooke and Clay Hilley performing the accompanying ancient Chinese poetry. That program opens with a piece by the renowned (and living) Chinese-French composer Qigang Chen. One evening features the Indonesian gamelan. The festival concludes with three performances of Claude Debussy’s shimmering La mer and a late twentieth–century work that freely quotes it, Tōru Takemitsu’s Quotation of Dream. — Molly Glentzer
Cowboy Bob (Alley Theatre, Houston, March 3–26)
We’ve got our hands up for the world premiere of this experimental musical with a Thelma and Louise spirit. It’s by an all-female creative team that features Molly Beach Murphy, an up-and-coming playwright from Galveston. Cowboy Bob is loosely based on the real-life story of Peggy Jo Tallas, a meek Dallas woman who robbed banks for a few decade to pay her mother’s medical bills. Tallas called herself Cowboy Bob because on the job, she dressed as a bearded man in Western wear. Texas Monthly’s Skip Hollandsworth once described her as “a modern-day Bonnie with no Clyde.” She eluded the law for a decade, until she died in 2005 during a shootout with police; she was wielding only a toy gun. Murphy and Cowboy Bob co-creators Jeanna Phillips and Annie Tippe tell the story through the lens of people that may need known her, including a fictional Chili’s waitress who’s hungry for life-affirming inspiration. — M.G.
Visual Art
“Leslie Martinez: The Secrecy of Water” (Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, January 20–March 12)
Born within the Rio Grande Valley and based in Dallas, Leslie Martinez was a breakout star at Art Basel Miami Beach this December, selling out a gallery show and earning a laudatory write-up in The Guardian. On the Blaffer, expect to see large-scale works that layer different materials, textures, and colours, including shiny shocks of pink, blue, and yellow. Martinez practices a no-waste studio approach, incorporating cast-off elements of older works into latest canvases, manipulating and restructuring the surfaces of the paintings into organic, almost sculptural landscapes. This will probably be the artist’s first-ever institutional show, thematically inspired by the Texas drought of 2022. It’ll be interesting to see how much Texas audiences are in a position to attune to the poetic intentions—Martinez speaks of wanting to link a meditation on climate extremities to the political atmosphere of the current moment—in these highly abstract works. — M.A.
“I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen” (Modern Art Museum of Fort Price, February 12–April 30)
The Modern’s next exhibit tackles the query of how the astonishing takeover of our lives by digital screens has been reflected in art. Its place to begin is 1969—yr of the moon-landing TV spectacle in addition to the primary messages sent over ARPANET, the proto-internet—and it takes us through our screen-happy present. Curator Alison Hearst has chosen pieces by fifty artists who’ve confronted this revolution of their work. The inevitable Andy Warhol is the most important name, but there’s a various range including Texas residents Liss LaFleur, Kristin Lucas, and John Pomara in addition to the late video-art pioneer Nam June Paik, represented by his huge American flag made up of 84 televisions. The show will sprawl across 25,000 square feet within the photogenic Tadao Ando–designed constructing, and plenty of museumgoers undoubtedly will mediate the experience for themselves the way in which we do now: cellphones up, framing images of those screen-culture commentaries on their very own little screens. — M.B.
“Day Jobs” (Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, February 19–July 23)
Don’t quit your day job—but, wait, really, don’t. A latest exhibit at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art examines the creative redemption many artists find of their every day work. The featured pieces explore ways during which learning a certain trade or developing expertise in an industry outside of visual arts can broaden an artist’s craft. “Day Jobs,” which can feature works by Emma Amos, Larry Bell, Chuck Ramirez, and more, goals to “demystify” the creative process and illustrate that artistic thought occurs in on a regular basis spaces while completing tasks sometimes considered banal (in case you’ve ever sent an email, ). Artists featured within the exhibit have been employed by major firms similar to H-E-B and IKEA, or have worked jobs as a dishwasher, hairstylist, and nanny. If anything, the exhibit is certain to supply just a little extra creative fuel to employees whose 9-to-5’s feature a good amount of daydreaming. — A.O.
“None In any respect: Zen Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection”(Museum of Advantageous Arts, Houston, February 19–April 23)
Don’t be fooled by the title of the exhibition “None In any respect.” The show incorporates multiple hundred masterworks from probably the most extensive collection of Zen artwork outside of Japan, lots of which were recently acquired by the Museum of Advantageous Arts, Houston. Among the many treasures that Latest Orleans residents Kurt Gitter and Alice Yelen amassed during fifty years are revolutionary Edo-period hanging scrolls by artist and monk Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768) that reframed Zen Buddhism as an accessible art form. We’re able to Zen out. — M.G.