If aural fireworks stir your red American blood more than midair explosions, here are some traditional Independence Day Weekend Concert options. Among the ensembles below, there probably aren’t quite 76 trombones, but it’s likely to sound as if there are. Scottsdale Symphony Orchestra: The outfit offers its 23rd annual patriotic…
It was inevitable that the trend in tribute albums honoring contemporary singer/songwriters–which kicked into high gear more than a decade ago with Famous Blue Raincoat, Jennifer Warnes’ remarkable Leonard Cohen homage–would begin to spill over into the musical theater arena. A new generation of stage directors seems to want to…
The new Adam Sandler comedy, Big Daddy, isn’t just the funniest movie of the summer; it’s also the most improbable feel-good movie of the season. It’s improbable because practically everything about Adam Sandler seems so unlikely, so strangely back-assward. His whole phenomenal career–from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore, from The…
Simon West, the director of the new thriller starring John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe, likes the kind of close-ups that bore into an actor’s face, exposing every clogged pore and mascara smudge. In The General’s Daughter, his camera also tracks in to capture the thick layer of sweat coating the…
Twice Upon a Yesterday seems almost too geared for the Sliding Doors crowd. By relying on the same kind of conceptual sleight-of-hand as that recent Brit hit (which owed a giant debt of its own to Groundhog Day), this romantic fable’s sense of originality and wit is greatly diminished. Although…
thursday june 24 ASU theater student A.J. Morales is the author of the cycle of six plays about cars, ranging in length from five to 40 minutes, collectively known as Automotivations. The one-acts, with titles like Stuck, Grease Monkey, Merge, Design, Pull Up to the Light and Maker and Model,…
The clock is ticking for Tempe’s College Street Garden, which for 25 years has been operated by green-thumbed members of the community, including the Kids Garden Club. Employing a “multi-phase organic composting system and several different methods of chemical-free gardening,” the half-acre garden has, over time, been built up into…
What are audience members in for when they go to a performance by Essential Theatre Company? “They’re going to experience stories from their lives,” says artistic director and performer Susan Southard. “Stories from the audience become the works of art that are performed.” More specifically, it works like this: Members…
Disney departed from its usual practice of basing its big animated features on classic literature or myth when it made what has proved to be one of the studio’s most popular films ever, The Lion King. Yet, just barely beneath its surface, that film had a streak of xenophobia carried…
Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While there once was a time–long gone–when books of short stories were published with nearly the frequency of novels, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even 1 percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp Fiction counts as an anthology,…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers–actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer/director Paul–that in old Gaelic culture the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end they have loaded up This Is My Father,…
In most parts of this planet, the arrival of the day of the year when the sun is out the longest is a cause for celebration. Here in Arizona, though, the Summer Solstice usually means nothing other than a few more minutes of punishing heat before evening cools things off…
It guards the door, like something out of whimsical sci-fi: a ferocious-looking dog pieced together out of rusted-out automobile parts. Shock absorbers form the legs, the body and head are some crazy amalgam of engine guts, and screws provide the bared fangs in the perpetually snarling mouth. The only variation…
thursday june 17 Comic and masterful impersonator Craig Shoemaker–his repertoire includes ace renditions of Don Knotts and Patrick Stewart–returns to the Valley, the location at which his concert film The Lovemaster was shot, for a four-night stand touring behind his riotous CD Son of Lovemaster. The pick of the American…
I am plagued by amateur playwrights. This season, there were twice as many apprentice authors produced on local stages as the season before. Every year, another theater troupe adds a “new works” festival to its schedule, featuring works by anyone who can clutch a pen or deliver a French scene…
In an early scene in Instinct, released by Disney’s Buena Vista Films, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close study of mountain gorillas…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged is a movie of enthralling visual poetry. Set almost entirely inside a ravishing Roman villa, it is a love story played out in furtive glances and stolen looks by characters on opposite sides of the ethnic divide. Culturally, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis) and Shandurai (Thandie Newton) couldn’t…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin to groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise–spoof the ’60s by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the ’90s–and danced an unsteady watusi along that…
thursday june 10 “I used to think that if you did an hour on TV, you couldn’t go and do that same hour live. But I’ve learned the opposite is true. That’s precisely the hour audiences want you to do. There’s this feeling that if you did it on TV,…
Looking at Vicki Schimmel today, a vibrant woman bouncing her baby son in her lap as she talks enthusiastically over lunch about her upcoming project, it’s hard to imagine her not being functional, much less suffering a nervous breakdown. But her life ground to a halt in just that way…
When grown-ups talk about their childhood summers, however fondly they speak of baseball games or camping or trips to amusement parks, no nostalgia of this sort usually seems able to compete with their memories of moviegoing. Not much beats hanging out in a movie theater during the hot months, getting…
Remember Andy Robinson, the busy, reliable character actor who played, among many, many other roles, the psycho killer in the original Dirty Harry, and Liberace in an ’80s TV movie? Turns out he has an active fan club, on the strength of his connection to–guess what?–Star Trek. Robinson plays the…
