August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is among the most stirring dramas written this century. The critically acclaimed play, about a black American family’s struggle to come to terms with its legacy of slavery, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1990. It is Wilson’s intention to write a play…
Thrillers that involve a threat to the nuclear family almost always have a reactionary subtext. Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Cape Fear leap to mind. When a director of Ron Howard’s guilelessness makes a film like Ransom, about a rich guy trying to best the man…
thursday november 7 “William Christenberry and Andres Serrano”: The two influential American photographers, both of whom trained as painters before swapping their palettes for cameras, are feted in this exhibition, which features some of the artists’ most famous–and infamous–works, including images from Christenberry’s Klan Room installation and from Serrano’s Fluids…
at the concert “Getting to Know You”: Clotilde Otranto conducts Phoenix Symphony in this family performance, featuring Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Showtime is 2:30 p.m. Sunday, November 10, at Symphony Hall, 225 East Adams; preconcert festivities begin at 1:30. Tickets are $8, available at the symphony…
Not many people are familiar with the sculptor Lawrence Tenney Stevens, who lived and worked in Tempe from the 1950s until his death at age 76 in 1972, but those who are all take the same sobering gulp of air before exhaling, “Ohhhhh, he was a character, all right.” Irascible,…
I’ve been a big fan of Paul Rudnick’s writing ever since I read his first novel, Social Disease, in the early Eighties. That book, and most of Rudnick’s subsequent work (the play I Hate Hamlet; several screenplays, including the two Addams Family movies; and his hilarious monthly movie column in…
I hate mimes. Who doesn’t? Say “mime” and I think of Marcel Marceau. Or worse, Shields and Yarnell. No matter who, it’ll be white face and a striped tee shirt and those loose-limbed bits with titles like “Climbing the Stairs” or “Walking Against the Wind.” Right? Not anymore according to…
The swing in Swingers is in the music and the talk–the self-consciously hip chatter of young men cruising clubs and dancing to big bands. Yet the story of this low-budget romantic comedy unfolds not in the ’20s, ’30s or ’40s but in the ’90s, this decade in which style seems…
A few weeks ago, I saw a preview for William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. A woman in the row behind me remarked, “He must be turning over in his grave.” Shakespeare, she meant. Well, why not? Turning over in one’s grave is part of what Romeo & Juliet is all…
orange crush Glendale Halloween Festival: Carnival games, a costume contest and free candy and prizes are on the agenda at this annual fest, scheduled for 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday, October 31, at Sahuaro Ranch Park, 59th Avenue and Mountain View Road. Admission is free. Call 930-2842. Halloween Parade of…
thursday october 31 Arizona State Fair: The corn-dog carnival continues daily, through Sunday, November 3, at the fairgrounds, bounded by McDowell Road and Encanto Boulevard between 17th and 19th avenues. Along with the usual attractions–midway rides and games, livestock and agricultural exhibits, etc.–this year’s fair includes “The Disney Fair” (see…
The subject of illness blips onto the cultural radar screen with regularity, but usually under the aegis of fund raising. Formal balls, dinners, 10K races–those are the public faces of disease in the Western world. Lately, however, an art/illness hybrid seems to be, if not blooming, at least growing. The…
Phoenix is lousy with Shakespeare this week. At Herberger Theater Center, Arizona Theatre Company’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona trods the boards. Macbeth is snorting and pawing the ground at Arizona State University’s Paul V. Galvin Playhouse. And over at Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre, both Hamlet and Macbeth–by way of…
Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris is a musical revue that became an off-Broadway staple nearly 30 years ago. Truth be told, Jacques Brel is quite dead. If he weren’t, Todd James Smeltzer Productions’ current version of this tired homage to the late Belgian lyricist might…
During the MTV Music Awards this year, Dennis Miller cracked that a band he was introducing was “so hip and alternative that Steve Buscemi tried out for a part in it.” Buscemi is to American independent film of the ’90s what Peter Lorre was to wartime noir–the signature character actor…
Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins opens with Collins’ trusted aide Joe O’Reilly (Ian Hart) speaking of his departed leader: “He never did what anyone expected.” But, in fact, Collins (Liam Neeson) does pretty much what is expected of a movie hero: He fills the screen with noble bluster; he aches for…
purple reign Barney’s Big Surprise: Barney the Dinosaur, the king of public-television kiddy fare, is joined by his cohorts BJ and Baby Bop and special guests Mother Goose, Little Miss Muffett, Little Boy Blue and others in this musical extravaganza, produced by the man behind the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge…
thursday october 24 Arizona State Fair: The annual corn-dog carnival continues daily, through Sunday, November 3, at the fairgrounds, bounded by McDowell Road and Encanto Boulevard between 17th and 19th avenues. Along with the usual attractions–midway rides and games, livestock and agricultural exhibits, etc.–this year’s fair includes “The Disney Fair”…
German choreographer Pina Bausch came to our own Arizona desert several times looking for material for her latest work, Nur Du, whose Arizona premiere is Thursday night at Gammage Auditorium in Tempe. Translated into German from the 1955 Platters hit “Only You,” the title song, one of 34 blues, pop…
All in the Timing, a collection of six short one-acts now being staged by Actors Theatre of Phoenix, exploded off-Broadway a couple of seasons ago. It snagged a spot on Time magazine’s 1995 “Ten Best” list and made an overnight star of its author, David Ives. Critics heaped praise on…
It’s becoming more difficult to crow about live theatre in Phoenix. For a couple of years, it looked like the local theatre scene was evolving away from the sort of mask-and-wig clubs that trotted out another production of Blithe Spirit every season. Small, daring new troupes were unfolding every couple…
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not the most amusing of William Shakespeare’s comedies. It’s clumsily constructed and makes an awkward shift into melodrama toward the end of the first act. All that makes Arizona Theatre Company’s colossal production of the 16th-century satire all the more impressive. Frankly, I’ve had…
