OPPORTUNITIES MISSED: Uptown Players has managed quite a coup in scoring the American premiere of the Pet Shop Boys musical Closer to Heaven. The show takes us back to a seedy gay club in 1980s London and features songs written by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe with a book by Jonathan Harvey. It’s the later that seems to be the problem. Mark Lowry compares the story to the dreaded Showgirls in his theaterjones.com review. But there is a silver lining here. “The good news is that the acting in Uptown’s Closer to Heaven is way better than Showgirls,” he writes. Lawson Taitte has similar problems with the book, but he’s also a fan of the acting, writing that the main actors are, “often excellent” in his dallasnews.com review.

LONG LIVE LIZA: Liza Minnelli swoops in this weekend for a pair of shows with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The Broadway legend will be singing songs from her newly released CD of standards, Confessions. Ahead of her trip, dfw.com got her on the phone for the briefest of interviews.

HIS LOSS IS OUR GAIN: “The Mourners” at the Dallas Museum of Art is probably the biggest museum show coming to North Texas this  year. It’s certainly the one we’ve heard the most about. In a nutshell, it features 40 alabaster statues from the tomb of John the Fearless, the second Duke of Burgundy. But the figures aren’t necessarily arranged as they were around the tomb. At the show’s first stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they were lined up two-by-two. But that made it difficult to see all of the details, Gaile Robinson notes in her dallasnews.com review. “The DMA noted the problem and separated the figures. One double-file group gives a facsimile of their original staging, but others are mounted alone or by twos or in threes so visitors can get close,” she writes. The show was organized by the DMA; if you want to hear more about it, be sure to watch Jerome’s interview with curator Heather MacDonald from last week’s episode of Think TV.