Curtain up!

Houston Theater Week returns with BOGO deals on the best dance, music, stage shows, and more this season

Most Houstonians love a bargain, and one of the best is back: the second annual Houston Theater Week. That means from Monday, August 14 through Sunday, August 20, patrons can get buy-one-get-one-free ticket deals on theater, dance, music and other performing arts shows happening in the Bayou City this arts season.

The Houston Theater Week website is up and running, allowing fans to plan their shopping strategy and check out shows of interest. For arts lovers and newbies alike, this is an opportunity to see the sheer depth of what's on offer in Houston's arts scene. Sales begin on Friday, August 14; be sure to use the code HTXARTS for purchases.

Spearheaded by the Houston First Corporation, Houston Theater Week offers tickets to more than 200 performances throughout the 2023-2024 arts season, at organizations large and small across the city.

“Houston Theater Week not only provides the public with great bargains, it also supports everyone involved in producing these exceptional live programs from the performing artists to behind-the-scenes professionals,” said David Mincberg, chair, Houston First Corporation in a press release announcing the initiative.

With more than 200 performances, there's a lot for audiences to consider. Fans of '90s angst — and Alanis Morissette — can catch the TUTS presentation of the Tony and Grammy award-winning Jagged Little Pill, starting August 29.

Ars Lyrica's Fallen Angels brings the paranormal to the organization's baroque music performance at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. Selections from Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen, Carissimi's Judgement of Solomon and more are performed by five singers and musicians on period instruments.

The Houston Symphony offers Duke Ellington's Nutcrackerinto Houston's holiday lineup, bringing the jazz legend's take on the Tchaikovsky classic to the stage.

Gloria Estafan fans and lovers of Afro-Cuban rhythms can grab seats to TUTS' On Your FeetOn Your Feet, the energetic music that tells the story of the Miami Sound Machine and its founder, Gloria and Emilio Estafan.

4th Wall Theatre Company explores what happens when well-meaning white educators get together to craft a show that is culturally sensitive and historically accurate in The Thanksgiving Play.

Stages presents the regional premiere ofPOTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, a feminist farce that explores power and the presidency with biting and hilarious satire.

The all-male Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo come to Jones Hall, courtesy of Performing Arts Houston, showcasing their skillful pointe work and hilarious parodying of classical ballet in an evening guaranteed to delight dance enthusiasts and newbies alike.

Main Street Theater's production of26 Miles is about a mother-daughter road trip that examines love, bi-racial identity and secrets.

Photo courtesy of Performing Arts Houston

MOMIX: Alice is one of the productions from Performing Arts Houston available as part of Houston Theater Week.

Audiences will also find performances by The Alley, DaCamera, ROCO, the Ensemble Theatre, and many others.

For anyone who's heard that Houston's performing arts scene is pretty killer, but hasn't known where to start in seeing performances, Houston Theater Week is a fantastic entry point.

"Something for everyone" is an over-used phrase, but this initiative easily allows patrons to find their niche and see what so many of us in the city already know: our performing arts are vibrant, alive and absolutely accessible to everyone.

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Houston Theater Week runs Monday, August 14 through Sunday, August 20. For tickets and full schedules, visit the official event site.

Write on

Global stars and best sellers headline 3-day Houston cultural 'bonanza' of literature and film

Mira Nair/Facebook

Acclaimed director Mira Nair (left, pictured with Richard Gere and Hillary Swank while shooting Amelia) will discuss her career on Saturday.

Literature lovers are going to swoon over this weekend's JLF Houston, a three-day event September 15 to 17, with happenings at Asia Society Texas, the University of Houston, Rothko Chapel and the Eternal Gandhi Museum. Back for its sixth annual outing, the Houston event brings an array of high-level creative talent to the Bayou City.

"This weekend JLF Houston brings to our city world-class writers as well as spotlighting Houston's own artists," Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, the best-selling author of The Mistress of Spices and The Forest of Enchantments, and a teacher in the University of Houston's highly regarded creative writing program, tells CultureMap.

"The festival enriches our cultural landscape with multi-cultural discussions ranging from India's freedom struggle and how it affected women to current-day challenges in Ukraine to cutting-edge astronomical discoveries. I hope Houstonians will make full use of this the-day bonanza, which also presents music and film and is followed each day by receptions where one can chat up-close with the presenters."

Look for an opening reception Friday evening at the University of Houston, which follows the festival's kickoff panel, "Ukraine: The Cost of War."

Saturday, September 16 is a day of presentations, panels, readings and discussions by some of the greatest names in books in movies. Taking place at Asia Society Houston and hosted jointly by Inprint, Asia Society and Teamwork Arts, the event is modeled after India's Jaipur Literature Festival, one of the world's most-renowned gatherings of authors, filmmakers and lovers of the written word.

Salaam! Mira Nair, Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, and more

The day begins award-winning film-maker Mira Nair, known for movies like Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding, in conversation with Sanjoy K. Roy, Teamwork Arts' managing director. Nair will discuss her cinematic language, the vocabulary of the moving image, and her special affinity for literary adaptation, including Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake.

Up next is the panel "Forbidden Pages: Banned, Burned and Censored." The ACLU Texas' Oni K. Blair, The Aztec Love God author Tony Diaz, and journalist, editor and chair of PEN International Writers in Prison chair Salil Tripathi are in conversation with retired HISD librarian Dorcas Hand. They'll talk about the rationale behind movements to ban books, and how ideas still thrive in the end.

Mira Nair/Facebook

Acclaimed director Mira Nair (left, pictured with Richard Gere and Hillary Swank while shooting Amelia) will discuss her career on Saturday.

In the first panel of the afternoon, "The Personal and the Political," award winning journalist Anjan Sundaram discusses his recent memoir, Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime, with Tripathi. The book explores the toll being a war correspondent takes on marriage, and how the scenes they bear witness to expose humanitarian crimes across the world.

Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni talks about decolonization and the devastating consequences of Partition, which form the backdrop of her latest novel, Independence, a sweeping saga of India in the last days of British rule, told from the intertwined perspectives of three sisters. She's in conversation with Pakistani-American writer and Gulf Coast Journal fiction editor Tayyba Maya Kanwal.

A Journey Through the Cosmos, Bandit Queens, and world peace

Additional sessions include Priyamvada Natarajan, a professor in Yale's department of physics and astronomy discusses her book, Mapping the Heavens: A Journey Through the Cosmos with Sanjoy K. Roy. Houston’s sixth Poet Laureate Aris Kian Brown, Nepali-Indian poet and writer Rohan Chhetri, and Assamese writer and poet Aruni Kashyap are in conversation with academic Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan.

Parini Shroff, author of The Bandit Queens, and Aruni Kashyap, author There is No Good Time for Bad News, His Father's Disease, and The House With a Thousand Stories will talk with academic and writer Mohan Ambikaipaker about the plurality of identity and a sense of belonging found in stories and poems by South Asian writers in the United States.

The day concludes with an author reception where participants can meet and greet the writers and presenters. More information is on the Asia Society Texas website.

To mark the beginning of World Peace Week, Sunday's sessions begin at the Rothko Chapel with music and a poetry reading. Salil Tripathi and Sita Kapadia are in conversation about "The Gandhis: The Story of Ba and Bapu" Sunday afternoon at the Eternal Gandhi Museum.

Tickets, registration and additional details can be found online. While many events are free of charge with registration, Saturday's sessions at Asia Society are $20 for a full-day pass.