I know the scarcity of local summer stock has gotten to me when I find myself driving to Peoria to watch one of our most amateurish amateur companies take a stab at a sophisticated British farce. Not having seen any theater at all in several weeks, I risked Theater Works’…
First the good news: The title of the high school comedy/Gen X nostalgia flick The Wood is not, despite this summer’s rash of double entendres, a dirty joke. The name’s as earnest and literal as the film itself, and simply marks the setting as Inglewood, California, the Los Angeles ‘burb…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy in your picture-perfect home, with your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and your soccer games and your barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
You probably have heard E.G. Daily, even if you’ve never heard of her. If you have children under the age of 10, you can bet you’ve heard her–as one of the busiest actresses in the field of cartoon and looping voice-overs, Daily provides the malapropism-studded voice of Tommy Pickles, the…
Although the Writer’s Voice is a great option for aspiring writers who are Valley-bound, if writing’s your thing and getting out of town your plan, Prescott’s Hassayampa Institute for Creative Writing will be the place to do both from Monday, July 26, through Saturday, July 31. This is the fifth…
thursday july 15 “Was Jack the Ripper a Woman?” That’s the question that’s being used to promote Paradise Valley Community College student playwright Allison Rose’s new speculative drama The Fifth Victim: Jack the Ripper Discovered. The work, directed by Gray Zaro, is the inaugural production of PVCC’s summer theater program…
“Was it I that hurried to the deed? No. It was the daemon that possessed me. My limbs were guided to the office by a power foreign and superior to mine. I had been defrauded, for a moment, of the empire of my muscles. A little moment for that sufficed…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City–when temperatures shot into the high 90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge, when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating with…
The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season–or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed 8-year-olds to the big…
It won’t take long for anyone familiar with the original Wild Wild West from television to notice that something is not right with the listless new Barry Sonnenfeld-directed film version. Yes, the film features Will Smith in the role of James West, and Kevin Kline as his cerebral sidekick Artemus…
In a touching effort to help the devoted art rats who turn out for the “Summer Spectacular” Art Walk stave off the heat, Coldwell Banker’s Success Realty Concierge Services has erected a “Tunnel of Mist” to keep walkers cool between galleries on Scottsdale’s Main Street, and China Mist Tea will…
In mid-1800s London, a group of young men gathered to study and discuss the Bible together. Founder George Williams formed this unassuming reading group in 1841 in an effort to provide post-industrial-age urbanites an alternative to life on the streets. It eventually evolved into a world-famous organization, the YMCA. After…
Thursday July 8 Several of the Valley’s top female vocalists–Ayanna, Karen Brooks, Dorothy Grayson, Maxine Johnson, Lady J, Kauffe, Lila, Karen Scott, Patti Williams and others–perform, backed up by Blues Ratio, at “Phoenix Divas Live: An Evening With Ladies of Color,” a benefit show scheduled for 8 p.m. Thursday, July…
Footloose is coming to town, and–for the duration, at least–I am leaving. Certainly no one who has made his living turning lousy musical films into equally terrible stage productions will miss me. This frightening trend–which I’ve carped about in these pages before–has seen the recent translation to the stage (if…
Every so often you overhear someone in an art museum or gallery wishing, “If only the art could talk.” Yet when contemporary art–thanks to electronic media–does pipe up, it often sounds like the cranky woman in Tony Oursler’s installation work Don’t Look at Me. Included in the Scottsdale Museum of…
Woe to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master–unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer/director Oliver Parker. He has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband and the skill to pull it off…
Joy isn’t a word that often comes to mind when thinking about the films of director Wim Wenders. But infectious, intoxicating joy is the emotion conveyed by every frame of this ravishing, exuberant documentary. Buena Vista Social Club is not only the German filmmaker’s most engaging, soulful film since Wings…
In John Sayles’ Limbo, which is set amid rough-and-tumble southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This thrown-together family…
Because the Fourth of July falls on a Sunday this year, many of the celebrations, concerts and the like are being pushed forward to Friday or Saturday. For the hardy souls who wish to brave the crowds, heat and parking purgatory on Sunday night, not to mention a bleary-eyed Monday…
thursday july 1 Down-home country comic Rodney Carrington–sort of a cross between Tim Allen and Garth Brooks–spends his Independence Day weekend in the Valley at 8 p.m. Thursday, July 1; 8 and 10 p.m. Friday, July 2; and the same times Saturday, July 3 at the Tempe Improv Comedy Theater,…
