Childsplay has begun its 19th season on a triumphant note with a stunningly imaginative production of The Secret Garden. This version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel is a new adaptation by Pamela Sterling, told in a straightforward narrative style that features a strong structure with a beginning, a middle…
Fife Symington’s partnership with Chicanos Por La Causa to build the Mercado retail and office center in downtown Phoenix was hailed by community leaders in 1986 as a visionary step that would help rekindle a deserted downtown. Nine years later, the Mercado sits nearly empty. Symington, now governor, has filed…
Director Carl Franklin’s 1992 crime thriller One False Move was a complex, fascinating and scarily unpredictable exploration of the tensions between the urban and the rural, between black and white, between criminals and police. While maintaining a harsh and violent moral tone, Franklin didn’t allow himself the luxury of any…
Though much about How to Make an American Quilt is lovely, both visually and emotionally, I don’t know what to make of the picture. The press materials say that it’s about “how women love men.” And so it is, but not centrally–it’s much more concerned with how women get screwed…
Get out your Raybans and suntan lotion because the Valley’s art season opens with a nuclear blast this year. Ground Zero is Scottsdale Center for the Arts, currently housing “Critical Mass” and “The P2 Project,” two exhibitions which examine the relationship between human beings and their seemingly genetic propensity for…
The most important theatre event of this decade, Tony Kushner’s epic masterpiece Angels in America, has arrived in Phoenix. It is the largest and deepest play since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? hit Broadway in 1962, and joins A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and A Long Day’s…
The word “tantalize” comes from the Greek myth of Tantalus, who tried to trick the gods into committing cannibalism. The gods apparently regarded this a fairly serious sin on his part, for they devised a horrid punishment for Tantalus in the underworld. He was placed in a pool of water…
Country living is often idealized in the movies, but director Michael Blakemore’s Country Life is about the price of the so-called simple life. The setting is Australia in 1919–just as the lads are returning from the Great War–and cinematographer Stephen Windon captures the outback in ravishing, warm yellows. The rewards…
When I first moved to the Valley two years ago, I did the expected thing–I made a visit to Sedona. I was interested in the town for many reasons: the allure of the name, which comes from Sedona Schnebly, who founded the town with husband Carl in 1902; the spot’s…
Theater Works is turning out its annual miracle: a great, bloated Broadway musical on a tiny stage in a barn. The occasion is its revival of Jerry Herman’s Mame, featuring 156 costumes and a sterling star turn. When the literati debate the virtues of Stephen Sondheim versus Andrew Lloyd Webber,…
After a vagabond year, changing location with each production, Phoenix Theatre is celebrating its 75th season in a newly refurbished home. The ample lobby, rest rooms and plush seats make the facility, renovated at a cost of $5 million, an attractive destination for an evening out. To christen the theatre’s…
You have wondered, perhaps, while watching footage of the Paris fashion shows, just where in God’s name the designers got the inspiration for their ill-conceived Halloween costumes. Director Douglas Keeve’s new documentary Unzipped gives us the answer: Nanook of the North. The subject of the film, renowned New York fashion…
The task of writing about the Grateful Dead phenomenon has fallen mainly either to Deadheads, who obviously lack objectivity, or to rock critics, who love to scratch their heads elaborately over the question of why a cult would grow up around this band’s pleasant if somewhat forgettable music. This question…
The actor’s nightmare is of performing in a play for which he has no memory of rehearsing or learning lines. For a movie director, the equivalent nightmare must be presiding over a set on which every imaginable disaster occurs, while attempting to shoot a difficult scene on a tight schedule…
Harold Pinter is arguably the most influential English dramatist in the second half of the 20th century. Traces of Pinter’s spare and oblique dialogue can be found in the works of Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Kopit, Sam Shepard, David Mamet and John Guare. Pinter spent the first ten years…
“I need a man!” screech female voices in the Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s classic tale of Spanish suppression, The House of Bernarda Alba. Since that sentiment suggests a solution rather simplistic for today’s women, one is left to ponder this play of sexual repression as…
The title character of Jeffrey, played by Steven Weber, is a young, gay actor/waiter in New York City. He loves sex, but nonetheless swears off it out of fear of AIDS. Shortly thereafter, he meets Steve (Michael T. Weiss), a beautiful young bartender he can’t quite resist. Before their first…
. . . Heaven admits no jest; wits that presum’d On wit too much . . . with foolish grounds of art Discover’d first the nearest way to Hell. –John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore A young man starts sleeping with his sister, and she gets pregnant. When she…
The title of young director Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects refers, of course, to a famous laugh line in Casablanca: Police prefect Claude Rains has just witnessed Humphrey Bogart shooting a Nazi bigwig. Instead of having Bogie arrested, Rains turns to his subordinate and deadpans, “Major Strasser has been shot…
Early in Last of the Dogmen, Barbara Hershey and Tom Berenger are exploring the Montana wilderness when she tumbles down a bank to the edge of a cliff. He goes to help her and takes a spill himself. The two are clinging to a rope tied to Berenger’s horse, so…
Grand Canyon University has launched a promising season of Shakespeare with a scintillating production of Tom Stoppard’s contemporary classical romp Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The sensation of the 1967 season on Broadway–it won the New York Drama Critics’ and Tony awards for Best Play–Stoppard’s witty deconstruction of Hamlet ran…
The Diviners came to my attention by winning the prestigious American College Theatre Festival Award at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. I brought author James Leonard Jr. to New York to participate in the Circle Repertory Company Plays-in-Progress series that spring. Based on the success of that staged reading,…
