thursday july 16 That least egotistical species of actors–puppeteers–convenes in Tempe for the Pacific Southwest Regional Puppeteers of America Festival, from Thursday, July 16, through Sunday, July 19, at the Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, 60 East Fifth Street. The weekend, which includes public performances, educators’ workshops and such prestigious guests…
Every now and then, Theatre Works departs from its standard practice of serving up audience-pleasing productions of mostly conservative faves, and presents something odd to shake up the subscribers. What other community theater–with a Sun City audience base, no less–would attempt Marat/Sade, or Steven Sondheim’s controversial musical Assassins? This tradition…
Spike and Mike’s Classic Festival of Animation is the other yearly film anthology from the same two Californians–Spike Decker and Mike Gribble–who concoct Spike & Mike’s Festival of Sick and Twisted Animation. Like Sick and Twisted, their annual blowout of scatology, sacrilege and sensationalistic sex, the Classic festival is a…
High Art is a low-budget American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so-world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential–the smoke curls…
For Valley Shakespeare buffs, north is an inviting direction this summer. Even for practitioners of “bardolotry”–to use Shaw’s sneering phrase–unwilling to trek all the way to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, a couple of more modest pilgrimages are possible: There’s iambic pentameter among the pines at Flagstaff’s Grand Canyon Shakespeare Festival…
thursday july 9 Four Valley photographers–Tim Lanterman, James Leland, Bill Timmerman and John Wagner–were given a nice narrow theme to explore: “America.” The resulting exhibition, called “American Photographs,” continues through Friday, July 31, in the central gallery of the Burton Barr Central Library, 1221 North Central. New Times staff photographer…
That oversize place everybody keeps calling BOB and its snaky home team may get all the press, but they ain’t the only game in town. For a solid season before the Diamondbacks came along, we have had an unsung team chock-full of local athletes playing pro ball for a small…
Except when they’ve been busy defeating the Nazis or something like that, every generation of young adults has whined. Usually it’s about their poverty and their crappy prospects and the failure of the world to recognize their innate value and reward them accordingly with money, praise and sex. But it’s…
In Mr. Jealousy, director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming) takes on the most coiled and resilient of the seven deadlies. Even as Eric Stoltz’s romantic comedies were becoming forced and generic by the time of Kicking and Screaming, in this bright comedy of manners his amiable every-mannerisms are sharpened by…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
An indefinable tribute to all things rhythmic, Stomp has officially made the transition from hip happening to pop-culture reference. Though it already had its own fan club, Web site and monster-size merchandising machine, the clincher for the troupe came when its members turned up in television spots for Target department…
Technicolor was a movie lover’s aphrodisiac during Hollywood’s Golden Age. It produced colors of astonishing depth, boldness and subtlety via a complex beam-splitting camera that generated three separate negatives. Lab technicians built them into a photographic sandwich that was developed with a unique dye-transfer system called imbibition. Now New Line…
thursday july 2 Veteran actor John Ratzenberger is best known as the know-it-all Cliff on Cheers. He’s less well-known as the father of a kid with diabetes, a vigorous activist in raising money for research into a cure for that condition, and an avid motorcyclist. Ratzenberger, now on Harley-Davidson’s cross-country…
Say what you will about the state of theater in Phoenix; at least our mask and wig clubs know their limitations. I’ve seen smallish Los Angeles companies cram colossal shows onto postage-stamp-size stages (most memorably a production of Showboat, shoehorned into a 100-seat house), but community theaters here typically work…
One of the more frequently occurring adjectives in reviews of The Truman Show, which continues to chug away at the box office, is “original.” Well, The Truman Show may be clever, may be touching, may be visually elegant, but it’s not original. The film is, indeed, a virtual amalgam of…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action-comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into his…
The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddy comedy that really…
thursday june 25 The vast screens and marrow-shaking sound systems of IMAX Theatres have been put to use taking armchair travelers to the wreck of the Titanic and to the Great Barrier Reef, up Everest and over the Grand Canyon, into space stations and beaver lodges–in short, to places we…
So a guy goes into a bar, and he sees another guy sitting there nursing a beer, looking incredibly depressed. The two strike up a conversation, and finally the first guy asks the second guy why he’s so down. “I hate my job,” the second guy says. “Where do you…
Call Lilith Fair whatever you want (and critics of last year’s tour had plenty of names for it–Breast Fest, Lesbopalooza, etc.). What you can most certainly call it is a success. The all-woman tour, founded by Sarah McLachlan and named after a reference to Adam’s first wife in Jewish mythology,…
In Hollywood, sequels are compulsory. Live theater, unlike Tinseltown, tends to be more selective about revisiting its characters and stories. Most of the time, anyway. A . . . My Name Is Still Alice, currently onstage at Phoenix Theatre, is the sequel to A . . . My Name Is…
