weekend event planner

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

The Rodeo draws to a close this week. Thousands of Houstonians will head to NRG Park for one last turkey leg, funnel cake, or Western wear purchase.

For those who aren’t slipping on a Stetson, this weekend is loaded with options that include a celebration of humanity’s thirst for adventure, Houston Ballet’s new production, and a bonafide alt rock icon spinning tunes in Midtown. Or just eat a lot of pie. We’re not here to judge.

Regardless, enjoy the end of spring break. Here are this weekend’s best bets.

Thursday, March 14

Chef Jane Wild presents Pi Day Pop-Up
Join the CultureMap Tastemaker Awards nominee for a celebration of sweet and savory pies. The chef will have more than 10 varieties available for purchase by the slice or as whole pies, including salted caramel apple, rhubarb, banana cream, chicken pot pie, and Wild’s signature salted honey. Enhance them with Little Dreamer Coffee or a scoop from Honeychild’s Sweet Creams. 9 am

Space Center Houston presents Moon 2 Mars Festival
Space Center Houston presents the Moon 2 Mars Festival, an interstellar week of fun that combines all things space with the adventurous spirit of past, present, and future space explorers. The family-friendly event features space exploration activities like AI and virtual reality activations, human gyroscope, STEM conceptual kinetic dance floor, bungee jump, and more. There will also be live entertainment and food. 10 am.

Sasha Colby in concert
Fresh off her win and crowning as “America's Next Drag Superstar” from RuPaul’s Drag Race’s 15th season, Sasha Colby comes to Houston as part of her inaugural, solo headlining tour, "Sasha Colby: Stripped Tour." The tour will be a live music experience that will have her going through a bevy of tunes, including her debut single from last year “Feel the Power.” The tour will also reveal new dimensions of Colby’s talent and creativity. 8 pm.

Friday, March 15

POST Houston presents Country Music Showdown
With rodeo season being in full swing, get your boots on for a two-stepping good time at the Country Music Showdown at POST. The Showdown showcases four talented Houston artists showing out for your votes: Tiona Campbell, Nick Gaitan, Amber Digby & Midnight Flyer, and Sam Turner & the Cactus Cats. The artist receiving the highest number of votes will win a booking for a solo show at POST! This event will be held at Outpose, POST’s rooftop pavilion event space. 7 pm.

Houston Ballet presents Bespoke
Bespoke brings a fresh, mixed repertory program with three ballets never-before-seen on the Wortham Theater stage. Continuing the long-standing commitment to bringing Jiří Kylián's work to Houston, the program adds another of his works to the Company repertoire with the premiere of Kylián's Overgrown Path. Set to the deeply moving score from composer Leoš Janáček, the work was created in 1980 for Nederlands Dance Theater in dedication to the legendary choreographer Antony Tudor. 7:30 pm (2 pm Sunday).

Improv Houston presents Marcello Hernandez
Marcello Hernandez is a Cuban/Dominican stand-up comedian, writer, and actor who's been killing it lately as a featured player on Saturday Night Live. (We’ve definitely laughed at those “Protective Mom” skits he’s done with Pedro Pascal.) Doing stand-up since he was 18 years old in 2016, he has opened for headliners such as Tim Dillon, Jim Breuer, Mark Viera, Gilbert Gottfried, and more. 7:30 & 9:45 pm (7 & 9:30 pm Saturday).

Super Freak: The Rick James Story
Super Freak: The Rick James Story brings turbulent life of funk/rock god Rick James (aka that guy from Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories) to the stage, creating a musical extravaganza that immerses the audience in a showcase of his popular hits such as “Give It to Me Baby,” “Mary Jane,” and “Super Freak.” Beyond the glittering facade, the musical explores the layers of Rick’s internal struggles and insane lifestyle filled with sex, drugs, and music. 8 pm (3 & 8 pm Saturday; 3 & 7:30 pm Sunday).

Saturday, March 16

The Union Kitchen presents Rodeo Brunch
All five of The Union Kitchen’s Houston-area locations will celebrate the close of the Houston rodeo season with a decadent, barbecue-influenced brunch on Saturday and Sunday. Chef James Lundy and his culinary team have created several rodeo-ready dishes inspired by the Bayou City’s crown jewel event. Guests can sip on bourbon-inflected cocktails, including the tasty Bingham’s Bramble, made with country singer Ryan Bingham’s own Bingham’s Original Bourbon. 10 am.

McClain Gallery presents “Donald Sultan: NEW WORKS” opening reception

McClain Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Donald Sultan: NEW WORKS,” featuring a selection of paintings and drawings that are a continuation of Sultan’s ongoing investigation of abstraction using the aesthetic structure of the mimosa tree in bloom. Inspired by the plants found in the French Riviera, this body of work highlights the artist’s innovative use of materials. This is the first solo exhibition of Sultan’s works at McClain Gallery and comes after a ten year absence in Houston. Through Saturday, April 27. 2 pm.

Ars Lyrica Houston presents "Visions and Reveries"
"Visions and Reveries" showcases a select ensemble of period-instrument specialists and one of Ars Lyrica's favorite singers in an all-French program. Its delectable prix-fixe menu includes lyric cantatas on mythological themes by Elizabeth Claude Jacquet de la Guerre and Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose contributions to the genre elevate it to high art, and a sumptuous instrumental suite by François Couperin. The concert features soprano Lauren Snouffer, violinist Manami Mizumoto, and Eric Taeyang Mun on viola da gamba. 7:30 pm.

The Ensemble Theatre presents Beatbox: A Raparetta
The Ensemble Theatre presents the regional premiere of Beatbox: A Raparetta, a modern dramatic musical production written and performed in rhythm and rhyme with vocal drumbeats (beatboxing), hip hop dance, and a live DJ. The play is soaked in the beat and the heat of hip-hop culture: the sense of desperation held at bay; the powerful rap rhymes built from equal parts of anger and hope; and the constant threat of violence. Through Sunday, April 14. 7:30 pm.

Sunday, March 17

Heights Grocer presents Sixth Anniversary Party
The Heights-area store will celebrate six years of selling its carefully curated selection of natural wine, gourmet food, and gifts with an afternoon bash. Not only will the shop be pouring free tastes from magnums, but shoppers will have the opportunity to purchase ceramics from local artist Lori Muñoz and a unique flavor from cult favorite Underground Creamery. Noon.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents Breaking the Code
Named “best historical film” by the Dallas County Historical Commission in 2023, Breaking the Code is an in-depth profile of Vernon Fisher (1943–2023), among Texas’s most influential artists. Director Michael Flanagan compiled interviews with Fisher, his contemporaries, and his students to offer unique insight into the witty conceptualism of Fisher’s practice and the striking independence of his career. After the free screening, the audience is invited to stay for a panel discussion with filmmaker Michael Flanagan and MFAH curator Alison de Lima Greene. 2 pm.

Houston Music City Forum 2024
Get ready for an exciting in-person gathering of music enthusiasts, industry professionals, and civic leaders presented by the Houston Music Advisory Board. Join us for informative panels, engaging discussions, live music, and networking opportunities. This talk can provide local music industry and city leaders practical ideas using music to grow our music ecosystem, enhance the economy and quality of life. Limited seats are available, so don't miss out on a chance to discover how music can impact Houston. 4 pm.

Sig’s Lagoon presents DJ Jello Biafra’s Incredibly Strange Dance Party
Sig's Lagoon, that beloved midtown record store, presents DJ Jello Biafra's Incredibly Strange Dance Party! Jello Biafra, the legendary, former frontman for the San Francisco punk band The Dead Kennedys, hits Houston for one night only, bringing his renowned vinyl DJ sets of garage, soul, dementia and a little bit of punk to Shoeshine Charley's Big Top Lounge. DJ Hot Rocks provides support. And the best part: there’s no cover! 8:30 pm.

Photo by Preston Meneses

Sasha Colby in concert.

Movie Review

Camp Miasma puts a comedic twist on the classic slasher movie

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing the slasher subgenre that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death — a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask — may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference — Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard — to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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