The holiday exhibition, which made its debut in Toronto in 2021, aims to capture the wonder and magic of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker through rooms filled with holiday imagery, organizers say. Tchaikovsky’s sweeping music, including iconic selections like “The March of the Toys” and “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” will play as visitors gaze at a shortened, 30-minute version of the iconic story.
Similar to the other Immersive exhibitions, the event will feature large-scale projections, special effects, a chance to meet a life-sized Nutcracker, photo ops, and more, they say. Lighthouse Immersive partnered with production Canadian company Storywall Entertainment on the immersive projection show, the first project the company has done.
Dallas is one of 11 cities across the United States in which the exhibition will open simultaneously; others include San Antonio, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and more.
Tickets are not on sale, but you can sign up for early access to tickets at immersive-nutcracker.com/dallas. They are also recruiting social media influencers to be "Immersive Nutcracker Ambassadors," which can also be done at the official site.
Alexandra Shipp, Lili Reinhart, and Victoria Perfetti in Forbidden Fruits.
There was a time when Dallas was a prime location for movies, whether it was for films set in and around the city, like Tender Mercies, or ones that used it to stand in for other locations, like Robocop. Dallas is getting its first notable shoutout in a long time thanks to the new film, Forbidden Fruits.
Set mostly in a NorthPark Center-like location called Highland Place Mall, the film centers on a group of young women known as the Fruits. Apple (Lili Reinhart), Cherry (Victoria Perfetti), and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) all work at a clothing store called Free Eden, with the three of them essentially lording over everyone else in the mall. That includes Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who works at the pretzel store Sister Salt’s and who wants to join their group.
Pumpkin soon discovers that, apart from being an entitled clique, the group also claims to be a coven of witches, with Apple especially using their combined power to get back at anyone who’s wronged them. When Pumpkin starts noticing Cherry and Fig going astray of the group’s code, she uses this knowledge to get in tighter with Apple, although she’s unprepared for how far Apple will go to protect her interests.
Written and directed by Meredith Alloway (who grew up in Dallas and graduated from both Lake Highlands High School and SMU) and co-written by Lily Houghton, the film seems to have the aim of combining movies like Mean Girls and The Craft. The peer pressure of being part of an exclusive group is evident from the start, as Apple essentially forces the others to live by her code or be ostracized (or worse).
One of the biggest problems the film runs into, though, is that any conflict comes from within the group itself. With no pressure coming from other friends, family, or co-workers, the group has to create its own drama. The story quickly gets redundant and stagnant, with almost no plot movement until the final act of the film, when it’s almost too late.
Alloway is clearly aiming for a campy vibe with the film, but the execution leaves something to be desired. The four characters are established in a perfunctory manner, and even as they get fleshed out as the film goes along, there’s nothing to compare them with, so it’s as if they’re just acting off-the-wall in a vacuum.
Those who know the Dallas area well will enjoy the local references (the women hail from Plano, Irving, Grapevine, and Highland Park), and Alloway makes sure to include the looming threat of a tornado into the plot. But since the film was actually filmed in Toronto, there are no visuals that make it feel like Texas, and so any goodwill she gets from setting the film in the city is muted by that lack.
While Reinhart (Riverdale) and Shipp (Storm in X-Men movies) have been around longer, both Pedretti (You) and Tung (The Summer I Turned Pretty) have made big impressions on streaming shows in recent years. The foursome play off each other well even when the story is not that compelling.
If there was a message in Forbidden Fruits that Alloway wanted to get across, she didn’t communicate it clearly enough. Her solid cast can only do so much to sell a story that doesn’t have enough on the bone to be filling. It would have been nice for the movieto be filmed in Dallas, but such is the way of the world in modern Hollywood.
