There’s an unfortunate trend in musical theater, a genre of live performance that can hardly afford another deadfall these days. Book musicals, once based on literature (A Connecticut Yankee) or original stories (Showboat), are today more likely to be adapted from cheesy Hollywood musical films. Recent Broadway audiences have had…
Deja vu is usually a sign of love at first sight. Says who? Says the heroine of The Thirteenth Floor to the hero that she’s on the verge of kissing. Though they’ve just met a scene or two earlier, they both feel they’ve seen each other before. That maxim about…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man–5-foot-3 and barely 115 pounds–but in his native country, his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set 15 world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled a trio of favored…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal and frequently raunchy dialogue and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mamet (for Glengarry Glen Ross), whose body of work…
Asked if the emotional pain that suffuses so many of her songs comes from real pain in her life, Jill Cohn offers a common-sense answer: “Oh, sure. It would seem strange to me, actually, to sing about someone else’s pain.” Having made the interviewer feel like a fool–without meaning to–the…
thursday june 3 Bona fide show-biz legend Mickey Rooney plays the title role in The Wizard of Oz when a touring stage version of the L. Frank Baum tale comes to the Valley. Jo Anne Worley, the wild woman of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, plays that embodiment of Midwestern evil,…
There’s a reason why A Thousand Clowns is a perennial favorite with theater companies across the country. Herb Gardner’s dark comedy is a wonderful piece of writing, with lively characters and a perfect blend of good-time yuks and hard-knock commentary. Arizona Jewish Theatre Company is closing its season–which honored Jewish…
The Love Letter has the dubious distinction of being the other studio film to open this past week. In a week when all the other majors have run for cover, DreamWorks has taken a gamble with a classic bit of counterprogramming–in nearly every way, this sweet romance/romantic comedy is the…
Maybe it’s the damned blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face–or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he does,…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelley a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is must viewing–love it or loathe it. In the…
Every two years, optimists and noncynics of various races and backgrounds get together and hold a National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution. In what some might find a rich social and political irony, the Valley has been chosen as the site of the biennial event this time around–it runs…
Well, that time is upon us once again–the time of season finales, the time when dedicated sofa tubers harvest the big dramatic payoffs and revelations and cliffhangers we’ve earned with a season of gazing rapt at the TV screen. By the time you read this, Ally McBeal will have whined…
Thursday May 27 To Jeff Dunham’s usual repertory company–fuzzy “Woozle” Peanut, crotchety old-timer Walter and pepper-on-a-stick Jose Jalapeno–the comedian and ventriloquist has added two new characters: Larry, who’s all a-jitter over the Y2K problem, and Bubba, a bucktoothed, freckle-faced rustic type. The lot of them takes the stage at 8…
Given the choice of watching a really terrible play in a freezing-cold theater or having all my molars yanked without the aid of Novocaine, I would–after recently enduring the former–have to opt for the latter. The play, Lisa Loomer’s tedious The Waiting Room, left me weary with boredom. And the…
Nearly a quarter of a century after the fall of Saigon, only a small film industry has managed to grow on Vietnam’s war-scarred soil. And what has emerged is rarely seen outside of local cinemas. If ever there was a country that needed to seize back control of its cinematic…
Tony Bui sounds like what he is: an American. The soft-spoken 26-year-old filmmaker grew up in the Silicon Valley–specifically, Sunnyvale–and went to school at Loyola Marymount. But for his debut feature, Three Seasons (see review on this page), Bui returned to the country he left when he was 2 years…
Fans call it “that Star Wars feeling,” the raw emotional high achieved by watching, or even just thinking about, the films of George Lucas. It’s a sort of gut-swirling, swooning sensation, the effect of tripping on a fantasy world, a wonderland, a place unlike Earth or even the movies. And…
We all judge books by their covers, and each of us has that one story that tells us why we shouldn’t. I first saw Chico Chism about 10 years ago, drumming away at Warsaw Wally’s, maybe with Big Pete Pearson’s band–I’m not sure. What stood out was Chico, a diminutive…
thursday may 20 Sometimes referred to as “The Freddy Krueger of Comedy,” the comedian-magician better known as The Amazing Jonathan plays the Valley this weekend. The performer, veteran of Letterman, Arsenio and such NBC specials as World’s Wildest Magicians and World’s Greatest Magic II, favors gruesome shock illusions, like chewing…
Like marching bands, the Ice Capades, the Rockettes, and Oz’s Munchkins, Riverdance has stolen the hearts of Americans. Perhaps the canny Irish feel the pulse of American taste. They know we prefer fake food and paintings by numbers, and when we win the lottery, we’re heading not for the Holy…
Compared with its recent exhibitions of paintings on copper and works from ancient Egypt, the Phoenix Art Museum’s “Great Design: 100 Masterpieces From the Vitra Design Museum” is a welcomed dive back to the commonplace. Instead of rarities and treasures, it features objects familiar to just about everyone’s backside. It…
In Adolph Frietag’s house, Jewish customs have long been buried. Although he and his family–sister, sister-in-law, and two nieces–are themselves Jewish, they decorate a Christmas tree every December and don’t associate with Russian Jews, whom they refer to as “the other kind.” Enter Joe Farkas, a handsome young Eastern Parkway…
