Weekend Event Planner

These are the 9 best things to do in Fort Worth this weekend

Festivals of two completely different styles dominate the landscape this weekend in Fort Worth. The first is a music festival that Fort Worth can call its own, and the second is an opera festival that continues to up its game year after year. Additionally, there are two new local theater productions, screenings of an Oscar-nominated documentary, and concerts by country stars old and new.

Below are the best options for your precious free time Thursday through Sunday. Don't like what you see? Lucky for you, we have a much longer list of the city's best events.

Thursday, April 27

Circle Theatre presents Rasheeda Speaking
Circle Theatre presents Rasheeda Speaking, a psychological thriller that pits two co-workers against each other when one receives a promotion to monitor the other. Office politics, fueled by racial contention, creates a battle to control the workplace. This chilling, dark comedy blends the realities of racism, superiority, and friendship to keep you on the edge of your seat until the very end. It runs through May 20.

Friday, April 28

Magnolia at the Modern presents I Am Not Your Negro
In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. In this Academy Award nominee, filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book Baldwin never finished. It screens six times through Sunday.

Amphibian Stage Productions presents The Trap
In The Trap, Clem and Tom, a young couple with financial struggles, break into Tom’s employer, a payday loan company, to clean out the safe. When his gambling-addicted boss arrives with the same idea, they're drawn into a strange scenario involving a gang of Estonians, a self-interested supervisor with a large mortgage, and an overly sentient alarm system. The play runs through May 21.

Dwight Yoakam in concert
Country star Dwight Yoakam is no stranger to the roller coaster that is the music business. His first three albums in the late 1980s all went to No. 1, while the late '90s and early 2000s saw him go through a relative lull. But his past three albums, including 2016's Swimmin' Pools, Movie Stars..., have all gone higher than any of his others in the past 20 years, showing you can never keep a good singer down. He plays at Billy Bob's Texas.

Saturday, April 29

Fortress Festival
The Fortress Festival, taking place on Saturday and Sunday at both the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Will Rogers Memorial Center, has attracted an enviable lineup for its inaugural edition. Headliners Run the Jewels and Purity Ring are joined by national bands like Peter Hook & the Light and Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, as well as great local acts like Sam Lao and Quaker City Night Hawks. With a staggered lineup both days, it's possible to catch parts of each performance if you plan it just right.

Fort Worth Opera presents Fiesta Fort Worth
Fiesta Fort Worth is a family-friendly party featuring a free simulcast of the mariachi opera Cruzar la Cara de la Luna in Sundance Square Plaza. This free event honors the cultural diversity of the North Texas community and celebrates Latino culture and heritage while offering everyone an opportunity to see the world’s first mariachi opera, featuring the legendary Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán.

2017 Fort Worth Opera Festival presents Cruzar la Cara de la Luna
That mariachi opera, which means To Cross the Face of the Moon, takes place at Bass Performance Hall if you'd rather see it from the source. It's a one-of-a-kind operatic experience, blending the folk traditions of mariachi music with opera to tell a gripping story of a family divided by borders and their struggle to exist between two cultures. If you miss it on Saturday, it plays once more on May 7.

Brandy Clark and Charlie Worsham in concert
Brandy Clark and Charlie Worsham co-headline this concert at Live Oak Music Hall & Lounge. Clark, who had a long list of hit songs for other singers before breaking out on her own, is touring in support of her 2016 album, Big Day in a Small Town, while Worsham is touring in support of his second album, Beginning of Things.

Sunday, April 30

More Fort Worth Opera Festival
The Fort Worth Opera crew are working overtime this weekend, as they'll switch over sets at Bass Performance Hall to prepare for the second showing of Carmen. Meanwhile, Voir Dire will continue at McDavid Studio, playing on both Saturday and Sunday. After this weekend, you'll have one more chance at Carmen on May 5, and two more chances at Voir Dire on May 2 and 6.

Run the Jewels is one of the headliners of the inaugural Fortress Festival, taking place on April 29 and 30 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Will Rogers Memorial Center.

Austin City Limits Festival ACL 2015 Weekend One Day One Run the Jewels

Photo by Daniel Cavazos

Run the Jewels is one of the headliners of the inaugural Fortress Festival, taking place on April 29 and 30 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Will Rogers Memorial Center.

event-planner

Movie Review

Music and Lady Gaga make for unusual Joker: Folie à Deux film sequel

Photo by Niko Tavernise

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux.

For a movie that was more about one man’s mental health condition than anything related to comic books, 2019’s Joker was shockingly successful, making over $1 billion worldwide and nabbing a Best Actor Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix and writer/director Todd Phillips are back with Joker: Folie à Deux(literally meaning "a madness of two"), a film that has some of the same themes but a story that could not feel more different.

After his murder spree in the first film, Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) now calls Arkham Asylum home, where he is alternately tortured and favored by the guards, and revered by his fellow patients. Arthur plays nice for the most part, which leads one of the guards, Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson), to allow him to attend a music class in the minimum security ward of the facility, where he meets Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga).

The immediate connection between Arthur and Lee allows Arthur to indulge in more than a few fantasies, ones that manifest themselves in the film as musical sequences involving the two of them. As his fortunes change and he is forced to stand trial for his crimes, Arthur returns to the fantasies repeatedly, with Lee giving him a sense of hope and security that has been missing from his life.

The film, co-written by Scott Silver, features songs so often that the boundary between reality and fiction within the story is completely blurred. Some of the songs show Arthur, Lee, or both singing at Arkham, while others emulate old musicals by creating numbers on a set meant to look like the Murray Franklin talk show from the first film. It’s fair to wonder how much, if any, of it is real or just things that Arthur has conjured to comfort himself.

Most of the songs - “Good Morning,” “Get Happy,” and “That’s Entertainment,” among others - are cribbed from the classic movie musical era of the 1930s-1960s. Their titles and lyrics have surface-level relevance to the story being told, but it’s hard to say their meaning goes deeper than that. They are also so chopped up and delivered so often that it’s difficult to tell what kind of importance Phillips was trying to put on any one individual song.

While the music is the obvious big change, the more significant one is the film’s almost total lack of action. The focus on Arthur and Lee’s possible relationship and Arthur spending most of the film at Arkham leads to very few scenes of mayhem. In fact, hardly anything of substance happens until the film’s final act, and what does happen is less impactful than what fans of the first film may want.

Phoenix, just as he did in Joker, commits fully to the role, appearing to become gaunt once again and making sure the character is sufficiently disturbing. The arc makes him quieter and less annoying this time around, which may or may not disappoint some viewers. Lady Gaga is fine as the character otherwise known as Harley Quinn, although it’s interesting that she was likely hired for her singing ability and the film rarely lets her truly let loose.

If the nihilistic tones of Joker made it a surprise billion-dollar movie, it would be even more of a shocker if Joker: Folie à Deux made anywhere near that type of money. The Joker character has been approached in many different ways, but this is one of the oddest yet.

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Joker: Folie à Deux opens in theaters on October 4.

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