The strengths of Sam Shepard’s plays are in the peculiar humor he brings to them. In most of his better-known work, the playwright/actor blends comedy and tragedy, pulling laughs from unseemly places. A new staging of Shepard’s True West that’s produced by a local movie company called Sudden Death Pictures…
No one would be served by the suggestion that Mesa Little Theatre’s The Pinchpenny Phantom of the Opera is a sterling production, or even that there could be a sterling production of this sophomoric spoof by Dave Reiser and Jack Sharkey. That wonderful title suggests that we may get to…
Watching Reese Witherspoon incandesce in the role of a 16-year-old girl stumbling through the reform school of hard knocks in Freeway, I was reminded of what Pauline Kael said about John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: “There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious.”…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature–in which, by the way, the animals did…
Given his commercial success as a novelist, Kurt Vonnegut hasn’t seen many of his works translated to the big screen. And, given the results with the few that have been filmed, he may wish he hadn’t seen them, either. Counterbalancing George Roy Hill’s interesting and spiritually faithful version of Slaughterhouse…
I’m a great fan of the original Star Trek show and at least one of the films (The Wrath of Khan, of course). Kirk, Spock and McCoy may not have been complex characters, but they were authentically mythic–Kirk was a smug trickster Ulysses, McCoy a crabby Sancho Panza sidekick, Spock…
On its 30th anniversary, Star Trek exists only as fetish or fool’s pastime. The original series continues to air as a faded relic; the Next Generation cast was put to pasture as a film enterprise before its time; and Deep Space Nine and Voyager run and rerun so often you…
thursday november 28 Of Ice and Hit Men: Phoenix Coyotes, Phoenix Roadrunners: Don’t cry for the Valley’s pro-hockey franchises; they’ll eat their fill on Thanksgiving–of haymakers and high sticks. Two editions of the most dangerous game are scheduled on Thursday, November 28: The National Hockey League’s Coyotes take on the…
’tis the season Here Comes Santa Claus: He might be a bit pressed for time, but magic–like being in more than one place at once–is one of the jolly old elf’s strong suits. Saint Nick takes up residence for the season at 9 a.m. Friday, November 29, at Tri-City Mall,…
Early in the beautifully written first act of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, one of the characters says to another, “I remember everything!” To which the other replies, “That must be a burden.” Albee, at 68, knows that memory can be a wily, artful thing, and freeing oneself of one’s…
I didn’t much like The Cocktail Hour, which surprised me. Not only because it’s one of the more amusing and sophisticated of A.R. Gurney’s comedies, but because the company presenting the play–and the director who staged it–normally offers more muscular fare. This time out, director Betty St. George and her…
Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts–and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too. The writer-director of Truly Madly Deeply and this heartfelt, eye-filling (but problematic and puzzling) adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient salts his movies with passionate specters. In Truly Madly Deeply, the main ghost…
In The Mirror Has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a Columbia University Romantic literature professor who endures a drab, romanceless life. She lives with her imperious, fault-finding mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall)–a beautician, no less–and wards off the attentions of a nebbishy suitor (Austin Pendleton) while pining for the…
Critics normally don’t spend a lot of time praising producers; in a medium that is both commerce and art, our job is to evaluate the art side of the equation. And the assumption is that while producers are raising, counting or raking in moolah, a movie’s aesthetics are in the…
nights atthe opera The Candy Tale and L’enfant et les sortileges: Arizona State University’s Lyric Opera Theatre presents this double bill of fantastical tales. The first, written by Dimitrije Buzarovski and William Reber and performed in English, has similarities to Pinocchio; it’s based on a Macedonian folktale about a candy…
thursday november 21 Three Tall Women: Arizona Theatre Company continues its 30th-anniversary season with Edward Albee’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner about a well-to-do widow who revisits the past, and who is revisited by the spirits of her younger self. Lawrence Sacharow directed the original New York production, and he also…
With its current production, Arizona Jewish Theatre Company has managed to cram both comedy and tragedy onto the same stage. The comedy is Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig. The tragedy is that this nearly three-hour-long play is enormously unfunny. Wasserstein’s relentless comedy concerns a trio of sisters who gather to…
Patient A is a small, infrequently produced play about the life and death of Kimberly Bergalis. Bergalis died in 1991 from complications of AIDS, which she presumably contracted from her dentist. Her case became national news and Bergalis a media figure and penultimate “innocent victim.” In this solemn one-act–presented by…
The astonishing documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills starts with a crime that seems unreal, apocryphal: the murder of three 8-year-old boys, one of whom was sexually mutilated, in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993. The filmmakers, Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger, let…
For the past five years, Valley Art Theatre has been gracing our community with Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, an annual collection of cartoons that bursts at the seams with scatology, sex, sacrilege and sophomoric shock. The 1996 edition is now playing, and though it has…
A homeless man stumbles into a New York fish market and asks for a glass of water. The owner’s wife gives it to him, and then, with a strange, sudden urgency, invites him home for dinner. Over her husband’s mild objections, by the end of the evening she’s offered him…
strings attached “The Wonderful World of Puppets”: California’s Jim Gamble brings his merry-marionette pals Algernon the Clown, Percy the Penguin, Rollo the Roller Skater and Yankee Doodle to Kerr Cultural Center, 6110 North Scottsdale Road in Scottsdale, for shows at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 16. Tickets are $10…
