The Robber Bridegroom works hard at telling everyone they’re having a good time. The characters are all eccentrics, the pratfalls continuous, the musical numbers relentless. But all this in-your-face cheeriness can’t really help a show like The Robber Bridegroom, presented by ASU’s Department of Theatre and Lyric Opera Theatre. It…
The title characters of Bad Girls are a quartet of fugitive whores in the Old West. Three of them (Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore, Mary Stuart Masterson) daringly rescue the fourth (Madeleine Stowe) from an unjust hanging, and the women take off across country on the lam, planning to settle in…
From the street, the pieces on the walls of Scottsdale’s Bentley Gallery look like large, somber, color-field paintings of the mid-1950s to late 60s. Pivotal Mark Rothkos, maybe. Or early Frank Stellas. But those mysterious, striped “paintings” happen to be 18th- and 19th-century ceremonial Aymara textiles from the Andean highlands…
When Of Thee I Sing was first staged in 1931 at the height of the Depression, it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its gang of pompous, Senator Packwood-style legislators who wave cigars and ogle the young ladies as overtly as they can. Plus a change . . . Watching…
The title of Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot refers to the unbreakable bond between two brothers. But in Fugard’s two-character, one-set play, the brothers–one apparently black, the other apparently white, but both classified “colored” under the apartheid law–are separated by racial hatred. And so, by implication, is Fugard’s South Africa. Staged…
Richard Connell’s pulp novella The Most Dangerous Game has been filmed once, excellently, under its own title–in 1932, as a taut, hourlong thriller from RKO–but has had its plot pilfered countless times. It’s the story of the mad Count Zaroff, played in the RKO version by Leslie Banks, whose hobby…
In the Western storytelling tradition, going back at least as far as King Midas, “gold” is more or less a synonym for “trouble.” It’s the symbol for everything for which you should be careful of wishing, because you might get it. You’ll only be able to keep it by losing…
It’s moan and groan time at the Herberger again. We’ve got yet another message/relationship play, this time called Sight Unseen. Written by Donald Margulies and staged by the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company, it treats us to two hours of four dysfunctional characters explaining how they feel about each other. It’s…
Rope, presented by Banzai Entertainment at Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre, is a murder mystery but not a whodunit–the play begins with the two murderers strangling their victim, hiding his body, then serving their guests a buffet from the trunk into which the corpse has been stuffed. The story examines why…
God, we’re sometimes told, is in the details. Most of us have had some epiphanic moment or another at which it seemed likely that this notion was true, but the Vietnamese period film The Scent of Green Papaya may lend it a different kind of credence. It’s intensely focused on…
Threesome has the look, and the all-important soundtrack, of another entry in the Generation X youth-movie sweepstakes, along the lines of Reality Bites. It’s a comedy set on a college campus, and it has just three characters of any significance–dormmates Eddy (Josh Charles), Stuart (Stephen Baldwin) and Alex (Lara Flynn…
Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe Art Detour is just getting too complicated. After spending seven straight hours boarding buses and pounding the pavement on Art Detour Sunday, I still didn’t see half of the stops on the two separate art routes offered. And much of what I saw…
Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe Art Detour is just getting too complicated. After spending seven straight hours boarding buses and pounding the pavement on Art Detour Sunday, I still didn’t see half of the stops on the two separate art routes offered. And much of what I saw…
Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe Art Detour is just getting too complicated. After spending seven straight hours boarding buses and pounding the pavement on Art Detour Sunday, I still didn’t see half of the stops on the two separate art routes offered. And much of what I saw…
Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…
Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…
Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…
The Good Times Are Killing Me was a surprise off-Broadway hit a few years back, and the autobiographical play by syndicated cartoonist Lynda Barry–first a novel–tries to capture the mid-1960s Great Society frame of mind, when blacks were moving into aging, middle-class, white neighborhoods. Barry’s voice is that of Edna,…
The Good Times Are Killing Me was a surprise off-Broadway hit a few years back, and the autobiographical play by syndicated cartoonist Lynda Barry–first a novel–tries to capture the mid-1960s Great Society frame of mind, when blacks were moving into aging, middle-class, white neighborhoods. Barry’s voice is that of Edna,…
