weekend event planner

Here are the top 15 things to do in Houston this weekend

Pale Waves ride in on Sunday.

Photo by Katia Temkin

This weekend sees hot temps and red-hot fun. Look for choice theater, a restaurant grand opening, beer olympics, and a bar party. Also look for events celebrating our African American community and Pride — specifically a pool party. And one party celebrates the year — half of it, anyway.

Dive in; here are your best bets for the weekend.

Thursday, June 23

Shabach Enterprise presents Fade To Black Play Festival
The Fade To Black Play Festival, Houston's first and only, three-day short-play festival to celebrate African-American playwrights, has been around for nearly a decade. Each year they perform 10 platys, 10 minutes each, written by the nation's finest, African-American playwrights, including scribes from right here in Houston. And even though COVID prevented them from doing the fest for a couple years, they are back with a vengeance this weekend. 7 pm.

The Warwick Grand Opening
The Warwick celebrates its grand opening this weekend. Look for drink specials, private tastings, a photobooth, DJ, summer swag, and much more. The event is open to the public and individual reservations can be made here. Also happening at The Warwick is a brand new happy hour, everyday from 4-6 pm, with half priced bottled wines. Guests can enjoy discounted wines anywhere in the restaurant, or choose from the bar bites menu if they prefer bar seating. 8 pm.

Two Schmucks at Two Headed Dog
Two Schmucks, the acclaimed Barcelona cocktail bar that recently placed No. 11 on the 2021 World’s 50 Best Bar List, is returning to the states this summer. The Schmucks US Tour 2022 will take the bar across five states with events at some of the country’s most renowned bars, showcasing its signature “Five Star Dive Bar” concept. The team will be offering up cocktails with such names as Ice Cream for Astronauts, Disco Infante and, of course, Schmuck 2020. 9 pm.

Friday, June 24

Proud + Present Yoga + Vendor Market
GreenStreet will be opening up its lawn for this Pride Month-celebrating event. Things will kick off with a 45-minute, outdoor yoga class on the lawn, hosted by LifeTime Fitness and featuring a live DJ. Following yoga, guests can sip on refreshments while shopping from over 10 vendors surrounding the lawn. Afterwards, guests can grab dinner at one of GreenStreet’s delicious restaurants. Guests can register here. 6 pm.

Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company presents Women Rock!
Mildred’s Umbrella is teaming up with Rudyard’s British Pub for this fundraiser, benefiting the theater company’s 2022-23 season. The benefit concert will feature local female-fronted bands, comedians, burlesque acts, solo artists, a silent auction, and food and drink for purchase from Rudyard’s menu. The party will be prom-themed, so guests can dress up fancy. The "King and Queen of the Prom" will be crowned later in the evening. 7 pm.

Marlon Wayans: Microphone Fiend Tour
Fans of the Wayans family will be spoiled rotten on this evening, as not one, but two of the bros will be doing stand-up in the city. Damon Wayans will be in the middle of a four-night stint over at the Improv. But little brother Marlon will be downtown, making a stop on his Microphone Fiend Tour. If you wanna check out both shows, see Marlon first. Then, speed over to Damon's second show at 9:45 pm. 7:30 pm.

The Alta Arts presents Massacre: Sing to Your Children
It will be a wild, bloody, political-poetical ride when The Alta Arts presents this play by Oscar-nominated, Puerto Rican-born American playwright José Rivera. It follows eight “average” previously non-violent folks, in the small town of Granville, who have just committed a gruesome act. Although the playwright’s Latin-American power themes are evident, the complex dynamics of perception and fear will be frighteningly familiar to any audience. Through Sunday, July 3. 8 pm.

Saturday, June 25

Heidi Vaughan Fine Art presents Objects from Sanders, Canfield, and Other Private Collections Benefitting the Houston Arts Foundation
At this secondary market art exhibition and sale, works that are presented will be from some of the most noteworthy private collections in Houston, including those of Don Sanders, William and Ginny Camfield, Jereann Chaney, Lester Marks, Dr. Alton and Emily Steiner, Bryn Larsen, and other important local collections. Available artworks will rotate throughout the summer. As works are sold, new art objects will be brought in. Through Saturday, August 20. 11 am.

Revelry on Richmond Summer Beer Olympics
The popular bar is hosting its annual Summer Beer Olympics. Grab a team of four of your family, friends or fellow coworkers to compete against each other and prove who’s best. There will be fun games such as giant beer pong, cornhole, b-ball shootout, flip cup and a water obstacle course. To enter it’s $20 per team. The first place winner will receive $400 in cash and a trophy, second place $100 dollars in cash and third place a $100 gift card. 1 pm.

Half-y New Year at the Rustic
The Rustic is inviting folks to come raise a glass and celebrate making it halfway through the year. The restaurant/live entertainment venue is putting a spin on the traditional New Year celebration by throwing a Reverse Happy Hour party, filled with fan-favorite, hand-crafted food and cocktail specials. Although it may only be the half-year mark, guests can prepare for a full night of live music that will lead up to a celebratory balloon drop and a champagne toast at midnight. 9 pm.

14 Pews presents In the Mood for Love
At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 love story, starring the powerhouse duo of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu Wai, is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career. 7 pm.

Sunday, June 26

Pride Pool Party at Space Cowboy
If you would like to celebrate Pride Month — but need to be in a cool, preferably wet environment while you're doing it — Space Cowboy is partnering with VeganChill for this special pool party. Billed as “the biggest vegan adult festival in Texas,” the event will feature vegan cuisine by chef Adriana Maldonado, cocktails by bar manager Sam Ruiz, local vendors, DJs and other entertainment. Admission is free, and attendees are asked to RSVP here. 2 pm.

Discovery Green presents The Fairytale Project
This project is a historically inspired tale for children of a modern-day, African-American family reconnecting with their East Texas roots through peculiar encounters with the past. With choreography rooted in a fusion of modern/contemporary dance, jazz, musical theater, and dance styles inspired by the African Diaspora, the plot follows the journey of a family with ancestral roots in Shankleville, Texas, wherein newly emancipated African-Americans began their independent towns. 5 pm.

Ferragamo Wine Dinner at Doris Metropolitan
Italian design house Ferragamo is collaborating with Doris Metropolitan for an exclusive night with the Ferragamo family winery, Il Borro. The Tuscan winery and farm runs as a carbon-neutral outpost for organic farming. Dinner will be $325+ a person. Salvatore Ferragamo, the grandson of the company’s founder, will be in attendance, mingling with guests and signing bottles of Il Borro. Dinner is at 7. Reservations can be made by calling the restaurant. 6:30 pm.

Pale Waves and 5 Seconds of Summer at Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
Rising indie stars and one of the hottest bands out of the UK Pale Waves will be opening for 5 Seconds of Summer’s North American tour amidst releasing new music ahead of their August album at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion. The pop-punk band has made a name by inspiring inclusivity and self-discovery and creating an accepting place for their passionate fans looking to find a community. 7 pm.

event-planner

Movie review

Messy Frankenstein movie The Bride! stitches camp and confusion

Photo by Niko Tavernise

Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in The Bride!.

The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.

Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.

After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.

It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.

One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.

Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.

Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.

Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.

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The Bride! is now playing in theaters.

movies film maggie gyllenhaal annette bening christian bale jessie buckley peter sarsgaard penélope cruz movie review