Mandy Moore will go on tour for the first time in over a decade.
Photo courtesy of Mandy Moore
Mandy Moore, who transitioned from pop star to actor in the early 2000s, is getting back to her first love, going on tour for the first time in over a decade. She'll bring her tour to Cullen Performance Arts Center on Friday, April 24, 2020.
Moore made the announcement on her Facebook page November 19, indicating that the tour will be "an intimate, elevated evening of new and old tunes, performed with a superb group of musicians," a show that will "have threads of what the writing and recording process was like with this band, almost like you’ve been invited in our living room for an inside glimpse." Moore released a new single, "When I Wasn’t Watching," this past September.
The tour will travel to 29 cities across the United States, starting in Pittsburgh on March 20. In addition to Houston, Moore will also go to Dallas on April 23 and Austin on April 25. All three Texas dates will feature opening act Madison Cunningham.
Moore made her debut as a singer in 1999, releasing six albums over the next 10 years, her most recent being 2009's Amanda Leigh. While she had decent success in that realm, she has become much more well known as an actor, most notably for her role as Rebecca Pearson on the NBC show This is Us, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2019.
Various pre-sales for the tour start on Wednesday, November 20, with tickets for the general public going on sale on Friday, November 22.
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya will be seen together a lot at the movies in 2026, with mega-films like The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three coming out later in the year. But fans can get a much more intimate look at the two stars in a film that offers a unique take on relationship struggles, The Drama.
Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) are a New York couple who are engaged to be married. After a quick-but-effective montage of their courtship, the story joins them as they are just days away from their wedding. As they get all the details like music, flowers, and food finalized, a visit to the caterer with married friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) proves fateful.
A few too many drinks leads to each member of the group deciding to divulge the worst thing they’ve ever done. While each story is slightly shocking, Emma’s takes the cake, so much so that Charlie starts to question their relationship. As they get closer to the wedding date, Charlie finds it increasingly difficult to get beyond Emma’s revelation, with each real or imagined conversation threatening to derail their previously tight bond.
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, the film is provocative, funny, and cringey as it tries to get to the center of human dynamics. Charlie, Rachel, and Mike have starkly different reactions to Emma’s story, and the way those play out over the course of the film provides, well, the drama. The harder Charlie tries to justify Emma’s past, the more his underlying feelings start to eat at him, causing friction not just between him and Emma, but in other parts of his life, as well.
Strangely, especially for a character played by Zendaya, Emma recedes more than expected. Her explanations for her previous actions are timid at best, and she mostly seems to be waiting for Charlie to forgive her instead of questioning why she needs forgiveness. Borgli favors the male side of the equation, and in so doing he doesn’t dig as deep into the root of the issue as he could have.
Still, the downward spiral at the center of the story has a propulsive nature to it, and each successive step proves to be both hard to watch and impossible to turn away from. It also helps that Borgli manages the tone well, keeping interactions between characters relatively light so that the film doesn’t turn into one like Marriage Story.
Pattinson, who gets to use his own British accent for once, put on an interesting performance that is much better than his last two roles in Mickey 17 and Die My Love. He has good chemistry with Zendaya, who manages to shine despite being laden with a role that doesn’t play entirely to her strengths. Haim and Athie do good work in small roles, while Hailey Grace and Hannah Gross make an impact in brief appearances.
The situation in which Emma and Charlie find themselves in The Drama is not one to be wished on anyone, but it’s presented well by Borgli, keeping tensions high for the bulk of the film. Despite the two main characters not given completely equal footing, the story finds a way to get to a satisfactory ending.
