Arts & Entertainment
‘Dallas’ reboot in fine form
Continuation of classic series deftly balances old and new
I finally caught the “Dallas” reboot (Wednesdays at 9 on TNT) last night on DVR — busy week — and though thoroughly prepped for disappointment, was delighted to find a tightly paced, deftly edited take on one of my all-time favorite shows that struck a perfect balance between edgy/hip/new and familiar/nostalgic/endearing.
Which is saying a hell of a lot — classic franchise reboots are notoriously hard to pull off. They always sound good on paper but when a show takes on a life of its own and becomes a cultural touchstone, as the ’78-’91 classic installment did, it’s practically impossible to catch lightening in a bottle twice. Who knows if it will last, but this week’s two-hour pilot did everything it needed to do to relaunch the series in a gripping, promising way. It’s light years better than “J.R. Returns” (1996) and “War of the Ewings” (1998), the two TV movies that continued the storyline and thankfully removed the bitter aftertaste left by the show’s bizarre 1991 finale (“Conundrum”) in which Joel Gray appeared in an “It’s a Wonderful Life” takeoff that ended with a shoddily ill-conceived cliffhanger with supernatural overtones.
The cast of 'Dallas.' (Photo courtesy TNT)
So it’s thrilling to see the old warhorse, which struggled mightily in both quality and ratings its last few seasons, doing well — 6.9 million viewers tuned in to this week’s launch making it the most-watched scripted cable series so far this year and outranking anything the regular networks had in its time slot.
Twin heartthrobs Josh Henderson and Jesse Metcalfe play Ewing offspring John Ross (J.R. and Sue Ellen’s son) and Christopher (Bobby and Pam’s son) all grown up. One can’t help but wonder, of course, what became of Ormi Katz and Joshua Harris, the two actors who played the characters for years as kids on the original show, but their absence is quickly forgotten as Henderson and Metcalfe are so easy on the eyes and good actors too.
John Ross wants to drill for oil on Southfork Ranch against the wishes of Miss Ellie’s will. Christopher is pursuing an alternative energy venture that has had devastating consequences in Asia. He’s about to get married at the ranch to Rebecca (Julie Gonzalo). His old flame Elena (Jordana Brewster) is now dating John Ross. It’s a clever premise reviving a theme from the original series — early in the show, one of JR.’s deals left the family in a precarious spot financially and Miss Ellie had reluctantly agreed to let them drill on the ranch, something she’d never wanted to do. At the 11th hour, they didn’t have to.
The older generation is still kicking, though barely in some cases. Bobby (Patrick Duffy) is battling a cancer diagnosis (he’s married now to a third wife, Ann, played by Brenda Strong) and J.R. is in a nursing home suffering from depression. Sue Ellen (Linda Gray) is also in the cast. Cliff Barnes (Ken Kercheval) will be in future episodes. Ray Krebbs (Steve Kanaly) and Lucy Ewing (Charlene Tilton) are sadly reduced to cameos. Let’s hope if the show is a hit, they’re invited back and fleshed out. Tilton, especially, is a fan favorite from years ago. I never had Lucy’s hair but I did appreciate her taste in men — from gay Kit Mainwaring to her hunky doctor husband Mitch (Leigh McCloskey).
“Dallas” 2012 works for several key reasons — one, it’s been long enough now since the original show ended, that it feels fun, not tired, to revisit these characters. Nobody can say how long has to pass for such things to make sense, but pop culture very much unofficially dictates there has to be significant time — decades — before such ideas can float. “J.R. Returns” and “War of the Ewings,” while fun to watch, felt like everyone was beating a dead horse, and few horses were more dead than “Dallas” in its last couple regular seasons when most of the original cast had either long defected or were reduced to glorified cameos or mentions. The reboot, however, manages to revive the long-dormant excitement the show lacked in its final years by casting charismatic young actors in the key roles — Henderson and Brewster especially stand out — but having enough of the original cast around to keep it all grounded in authenticity. Using the original Texas-based exteriors, where several reunions have taken place over the years, is as key as the presence of Hagman, Duffy and Gray.
Principal, sixth from left, joined the cast for a 2004 non-dramatized reunion.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Victoria Principal (whose Pam was the original series’ central character in its early years) is a no show. She hasn’t fully shunned the show that made her famous — she showed up for a classic Vanity Fair photo shoot in the mid-’90s and for the 2004 “Return to Southfork” reunion (which featured cast members in a non-scripted format appearing as themselves), but has eschewed any thoughts of reviving her role. She told Ultimate Dallas (ultimatedallas.com, the amazingly thorough fan site) a few years ago the notion seemed rather absurd this many years later. Even so, she was never as chummy with the rest of the cast (Hagman, Duffy and Gray are close friends in real life and gathered regularly even before the show relaunched).
If Principal seems only vaguely interested — Duffy told TV Guide last week they talked by phone recently and she wished him the best on the new show — she’s still more involved than the late Barbara Bel Geddes (Miss Ellie) was in her final years. Not only did she sit out the last season (having left once before but come back), she was a no-show for both the TV movies, the Vanity Fair photo shoot and the 2004 reunion (she may have been ill for the latter — she died of cancer in 2005). She wasn’t, however, entirely reclusive in her later years — she did memorable commentary for a “Vertigo” restoration (she played Midge in the ’58 Hitchcock classic) in ’96. It’s a shame. She and Howard Keel (whose Clayton Farlow was a staple for 10 seasons), now both dead, would have been great additions to the Vanity Fair gathering. People always remember Jock (the late Jim Davis), but Clayton was on the show far longer.
The key to the new show’s success will be the degree to which it manages to maintain this delicate balancing act of old and new. Focus too much on J.R., Sue Ellen and Bobby and it looks like a Motown revival tour. But conversely, if the younger cast gets all the air time, there’s no anchor to the past. The scenes in which the two generations interacted were the best on Wednesday’s premiere — Hagman, who at age 80 has lost none of the lip-smaking relish he brought to what should have been an Emmy-winning role, plays especially well with Henderson, whose John Ross is presented as a manipulative chip off the old block.
A short scene by the Southfork pool with Henderson and Gray was the debut’s best. As Sue Ellen offered her son her support in the never-ending battle over the land (a recurring theme in the original series), Gray’s delivery crackled with tension. She looks amazing. Her icy glares shoot the same daggers they did all those years on the original series.
There were a few shoddy elements — the soundstages that are supposed to be the Southfork interiors lack both the floorplan and dimensions of those of the old show (which themselves did not match the interiors or layout of the real Southfork ranch where the exteriors have always been filmed) — but where it really counts, the new “Dallas” works. Even the opening credits, featuring a savvy twist on the original montage and a deliciously effective re-orchestration of the show’s majestic theme music, work.
It’s off to as solid a start as could possibly be expected.
Theater
‘Jonah’ an undeniably compelling but unusual memory play
Studio production draws on scenes from the past, present, and from imagination
‘Jonah’
Through April 19
Studio Theatre
1504 14th St., N.W.
$55-$95 (discounts available)
Studiotheatre.org
Written by Rachel Bonds, “Jonah” is an undeniably compelling but unusual memory play with scenes pulled from the past, some present, and others seemingly imagined. Despite its title, the play is about Ana, a complicated young woman processing past trauma from the fragile safety of her usually quiet bedroom.
Studio Theatre’s subtly powerful production (through April 19) is finely realized. Director Taylor Reynolds smartly helms an especially strong cast and an inspired design team.
As Ana, out actor Ismenia Mendes radiates a quiet magnetism. She nails the intelligent woman with a hard exterior that sometimes melts away to reveal a warm curiosity and sense of humor despite a history of loss.
When we first meet Ana, she’s a scholarship student at a boarding school where she’s very much on the radar of Jonah, a sensitive day student (charmingly played by Rohan Maletira). Initially reluctant to know him, Ana soon breaks the ice by playfully lifting her shirt and flashing him. It’s a budding romance oozing with inexperience. And just like that, there’s a blast of white light and woosh, Jonah’s gone. Literally sucked out of an upstage door.
Clearly romanticized, the scenes between Ana and Jonah are a perfect memory captured in time that surely must be too good to be entirely true.
“Jonah,” a well-made nonlinear work, is pleasing to follow. Each of Bond’s scenes end with a promise that more will be revealed. And over its almost two hours, Ana’s story deftly unfolds in some satisfying ways, ultimately piecing together like a puzzle.
Next, Ana is a college writing student. She’s alone in her dorm room when volatile stepbrother Danny (Quinn M. Johnson) visits the campus. Growing up in Detroit, Danny was Ana’s protector taking the brunt of her stepfather’s abuse after the untimely death Ana’s mother. Now, he’s sort of a clinging nuisance; nonetheless, they maintain a trauma rooted relationship.
And finally, 40ish and still guarded, Ana is a published writer. While working in her bedroom at a rural writer’s retreat, she’s joined by a nerdy stranger, Steven (Louis Reyes McWilliams). At first annoyed by this fellow writer’s presence, Ana is ultimately won over by his dogged devotion, sincerity, and kind words. What’s more, he’s not unacquainted with abuse, and he’s willing to delve into discussions of intimacy. Again, is it too good to be true?
Chronology be damned, these three male characters come and go, dismissed and recalled. It’s through them that Ana’s emotional journey is reflected. They pursue, but she allows them into her life in different ways for different reasons.
Bonds, whose plays have been produced at Studio in the past (world premiere of “The Wolfe Twins” and “Curve of Departure”), and Reynolds who scored a huge success directing Studio’s production of “Fat Ham” in 2023, are well matched. Reynolds’s successful intimate staging and obvious respect for the script’s serious themes without losing its lighter moments are testimony to that.
Essential to the play is Ana’s bedroom created by set designer Sibyl Wickersheimer. It’s a traditional kind of bedroom, all wooden furniture with a neat and tidy kind of farmhouse feel to it. There are two large window frames with views of darkness. It could be anywhere. The only personal items are writing devices and maybe the lived-in bedding, but other than that, not a lot indicates home.
Movies
The Oscar-losing performance that’s too good to miss
‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ now streaming
Now that Oscar season is officially over, most movie lovers are ready to move on and start looking ahead to the upcoming crop of films for the standouts that might be contenders for the 2026 awards race.
Even so, 2025 was a year with a particularly excellent slate of releases: Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” which became rivals for the Best Picture slot as well as for total number of wins for the year, along with acclaimed odds-on favorites like “Hamnet,” with its showcase performance by Best Actress winner Jessie Buckley, and “Weapons,” with its instantly iconic turn by Best Supporting Actress Amy Madigan.
But while these high-profile titles may have garnered the most attention (and viewership), there were plenty of lesser-seen contenders that, for many audiences, might have slipped under the radar. So while we wait for the arrival of this summer’s hopeful blockbusters and the “prestige” cinema that tends to come in the last quarter of the year, it’s worth taking a look back at some of the movies that may have come up short in the quest for Oscar gold, but that nevertheless deserve a place on any film buff’s “must-see” list; one of the most essential among them is “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” which earned a Best Actress Oscar nod for Rose Byrne. A festival hit that premiered at Sundance and went on to win international honors – for both Byrne and filmmaker Jane Bronstein – from other film festivals and critics’ organizations (including the Dorian Awards, presented by GALECA, the queer critics association), it only received a brief theatrical release in October of last year, so it’s one of those Academy Award contenders that most people who weren’t voters on the “FYC” screener list for the Oscars had limited opportunity to see. Now, it’s streaming on HBO Max.
Written and directed by Bronstein, it’s not the kind of film that will ever be a “popular” success. Surreal, tense, disorienting, and loaded with trigger-point subject matter that evokes the divisive emotional biases inherent in its premise, it’s an unsettling experience at best, and more likely to be an alienating one for any viewer who comes to it unprepared.
Byrne stars as Linda, a psychotherapist who juggles a busy practice with the demands of being mother to a child with severe health issues; her daughter (Delaney Quinn) suffers from a pediatric feeding disorder and must take her nutrition through a tube, requiring constant supervision and ongoing medical therapy – and she’s not polite about it, either. Seemingly using her condition as an excuse to be coddled, the child is uncooperative with her treatment plan and makes excessive demands on her mother’s attention, and the girl’s father (Christian Slater) – who spends weeks away as captain of a cruise ship – expects Linda to manage the situation on the home front while offering little more than criticism and recriminations over the phone.
Things are made even more stressful when the ceiling collapses in their apartment, requiring mother and child to move to a seedy beachside motel. Understandably overwhelmed, Linda turns increasingly toward escape, mostly through avoidance and alcohol; she finds her own inner conflicts reflected by her clients – particularly a new mother (Danielle Macdonald) struggling with extreme postpartum anxiety – and her therapy sessions with a colleague (Conan O’Brien, in a brilliantly effective piece of against-type casting) threaten to cross ethical and professional boundaries. Growing ever more isolated, she eventually finds a thread of potential connection in the motel’s sympathetic superintendent (A$AP Rocky) – but with her own mental state growing ever more muddled and her daughter’s health challenges on the verge of becoming a lifelong burden, she finds herself drawn toward an unthinkable solution to her dilemma.
With its cryptic title – which sounds like the punchline to a macabre joke and evokes expectations of “body horror” creepiness – and its dreamlike, disjointed approach, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” feels like a dark comedic thriller from the outset, but few viewers are likely to get many laughs from it. Too raw to be campy and too cold to invite our compassion, it’s a film that dwells in an uncomfortable zone where we are too mortified to be moved and too appalled to look away. Though it’s technically a drama, Bronstein presents it as a horror story, of sorts, driven by psychological rather than supernatural forces, and builds it on an uneasy structure that teases us with expectations of “body horror” grotesquerie while forcing us to identify with a character whose lack of (presumably) universal parental instinct feels transgressive in a way that is somehow even more disquieting than the gore and mutilation we imagine might be coming at any moment of the film.
And we do imagine it, even expect it to come, which is as much to do with the near-oppressive claustrophobia that results from Bronstein’s use of near-constant close-ups as it does with the hint of impending violence that pervades the psychological tension. It’s not just that our frame of vision is kept tight and limited; her tactic keeps us uncertain of what’s going on outside the edges, creating a near-constant sense of something unseen lurking just beyond our view. Yet it also helps to put us into Linda’s state of mind; for almost the entire film, we never see the face of her daughter – nor do we ever know the child’s name – and her husband is just a strident voice on the other end of a phone call, and the effect places us squarely into her dissociated, depressed, and desperate existence.
Anchoring it all, of course, is Byrne’s remarkable performance. Vivid, vulnerable, and painfully real, it’s the centerpiece of the film, the part that emerges as greater than the whole; and while Oscar may have passed her over, she delivers a star turn for the ages and gives profound voice to a dark side of feminine experience that is rarely allowed to be aired.
That, of course, is the key to Bronstein’s seeming purpose; inspired by her own struggles with postpartum depression, her film feels like both a confession and an exorcism, a parable in which the expectations of unconditional motherly love fall into question, and the burden placed on a woman to subjugate her own existence in service of a child – and a seemingly ungrateful one, at that – becomes a powerful exploration of feminist themes. It’s an exploration that might go too far, for some, but it expresses a truth that those of us who are not mothers (and many of us who are) might be loath to acknowledge.
Uncomfortable though it may be, Bronstein’s movie draws us in and persuades our emotional investment despite its difficult and unlikable characters, thanks to her star player and her layered, puzzle-like screenplay, which captures Linda’s scattered psyche and warped perceptions with an approach that creates structure through fragments, clues and suggestions; and while it may not land quite as squarely, in the end, as we might hope, its bold and transgressive style – coupled with the career-topping performance at its center – are more than enough reason to catch this Oscar “also-ran” before putting this year’s award season behind you once and for all.
Friday, March 27
Center Aging Monthly Luncheon With Yoga will be at 12 p.m. at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. Email Mac at [email protected] if you require ASL interpreter assistance, have any dietary restrictions, or questions about this event.
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Happy Hour” at 7 p.m. at Dupont Italian Kitchen. This is a chance to relax, make new friends, and enjoy happy hour specials at this classic retro venue. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Trans and Genderqueer Game Night will be at 7 p.m. at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. This is a relaxing, laid-back evening of games and fun. All are welcome and there’ll be card and board games on hand. Feel free to bring your own games to share. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Trans Discussion Group will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This event is intended to provide an emotionally and physically safe space for trans people and those who may be questioning their gender identity/expression to join together in community and learn from one another. For more details, email [email protected].
Saturday, March 28
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
The DC Center for the LGBT Community will host “Sunday Supper on Saturday” at 2 p.m. It’s more than just an event; it’s an opportunity to step away from the busyness of life and invest in something meaningful, and enjoy delicious food, genuine laughter, and conversations that spark connection and inspiration. For more details, visit the Center’s website.
Black Lesbian Support Group will be at 1 p.m. on Zoom. This is a peer-led support group devoted to the joys and challenges of being a Black Lesbian. For more details, email [email protected].
Monday, March 30
“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
“Tea Time! A Local DC Drag Comedy Show” will be at 3 p.m. at Spark Social. This is a live drag comedy show where drag legends TrevHER & Tiara Missou Sidora host spill all the tea in the DMV. This event is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Tuesday, March 31
Visibili-TEA Party will be at 6 p.m. at Restoration Station. Guests are encouraged to come sip, celebrate, and shine together. This event is a Trans Day of Visibility celebration and a special collaboration between Auntie’s Home and Damien Ministries. This is a boozy tea party with intention and the dress code reflects the vibe. More details are available on Eventbrite.
Wednesday, March 1
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.
Thursday, April 2
The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breathwork and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
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