San Juan Capistrano has nothing on us. Sure, they’ve got their wimpy little swallows choking up the trees every year, but we here in the Valley can witness the wonder and majesty of the annual return of the mighty Cathartes Aura. That’s right folks — the turkey vultures are returning…
Ennio Morricone can tell you stories about each of his 400 children — where they were conceived, what they mean to him, why each one remains so singular and special he cannot and will not choose a favorite. He’s proud even of the orphans, the runts, the bastards, the children…
For years, I’ve harbored two secret but obsessive desires. The first is to furnish an entire house solely with swap meet treasures in truly terrible taste — you know, resin-on-wood wall clocks decorated with praying hands, garish orange floral crushed velvet couches, faded plastic flower arrangements, glitter-splashed plaster of Paris…
After seeing her performance in In Mixed Company’s Pterodactyls, I have scratched Barbara McGrath from my list of Actors I’d Rather Not See On Stage Ever Again. McGrath’s star turn in Nicky Silver’s dark comedy has wiped away my memory of her last several attempts at acting, which I found…
Ever since Arizona Theatre Company announced early last year that it had optioned Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves, I’ve been wondering: Why? This threadbare marriage comedy is usually seen, on those occasions when it’s trotted out, at tiny community houses, where audiences are more tolerant of pale pleasantries…
It’s tough to name the feeling you get being rolled, head first, into James Turrell’s Gasworks — maybe a little anxious, maybe a little silly. Yet when the friendly attendant in a white lab coat reminds you not to sit up once the light show begins inside the spherical chamber,…
Artist Joy Episalla is a student of the past. The history that she documents through the lens of her trusty 35mm camera isn’t one of political turmoil, international conflict or even the lives of great figures. In fact, people don’t show up in her work at all. Rather, the history…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
We can run, we can hide, we can even try switching films, but there’s just no escaping that pesky Gene Hackman. He starred in The Conversation, he is ubiquitous, and revere him we must — virtually every single time we go to the movies. (There’s even a song by Robyn…
NBC can take heart. Even as the network gets steamrollered this season by Survivor over on CBS, it’s building up some fine karma for itself after midnight. Having finally put the woeful Later out of its misery, the Peacock has filled its 1 to 1:30 a.m. time slot, Monday through…
Over 40 years, an estimated 19 million people around the world have seen Alvin Ailey’s first major work, Revelations, and this is your opportunity to join those who’ve been moved by it. Presented by Scottsdale Center for the Arts through the generosity of its Marriott Dance Series, Alvin Ailey American…
If you need an antidote for the diabetic coma you may have fallen into after seeing Phoenix Art Museum’s syrupy “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” exhibition, we suggest hightailing it — stat — to Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale. The gallery’s current group exhibition, which includes recent work by…
Very occasionally, one of our local companies produces a perfect evening of theater. The first indication that Actors Theatre of Phoenix had weighed in with a contender came when the curtain rose on Jeff Thomson’s breathtaking set design for The Archbishop’s Ceiling. The first-night audience burst into excited applause and…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a cross between the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi-shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin Romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow drama,…
Be not deceived by the Merchant/Ivory name attached to Ratcatcher; those in search of repressed emotions among the corseted well-to-do will be in for a nasty shock. For this is a Scottish working-class film, and, like its compatriots The Acid House and Orphans, it is laden with squalor and violence…
The current state of American teen romantic comedy can be tough to bring into focus. It may not even really be a genre, but rather one big über-movie, a pulsating — listlessly pulsating — mass of Freddie Prinze Jr. and Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst and Jody Lyn O’Keefe and…
Some reserved, polite reading at Borders or Barnes & Noble or Changing Hands this ain’t. The term “penny dreadful” used to refer to potboiler fictions of earlier centuries which focused on the lurid, the sensational, the violent, the debauched. It’s a badge that the five scribblers featured in “Penny Dreadfuls:…
Emily Dickinson, the great spinster-bard of Amherst, Massachusetts, died young. She was just 56 when Death, in her phrase, “kindly stopped” for her in 1886. Death has been much kinder still to lovers of American acting: Julie Harris has outlived Dickinson’s age by two decades, and is still going strong.Of…
Gil Cates takes a long, deep breath before answering the question: Is producing the Academy Awards show the ultimate no-win situation? Cates has produced nine of the past 11 Oscar telecasts, and he returns March 25 after a year’s layoff; for those scoring at home, Cates is not to blame…
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film-actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary probably…
Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 1996 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track…
In recent years, a theory has gained currency in paleontological circles that, basically, dinosaurs didn’t really become extinct — they just grew feathers, and a few of them learned to fly. Modern-day birds, the theory holds, are not just distant evolutionary cousins of the bad boys of the Jurassic, but…
