A theater critic can’t afford to have a favorite play. Saddled with personal preference and fond memories of a first performance, he’s apt to overlook the show’s flaws once it’s revived. But my response to Lanford Wilson’s Lemon Sky hasn’t been equaled in the 14 years since I first saw…
There’s no faulting Tango where technique is concerned. This collaboration between the Spanish writer-director Carlos Saura, the great Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and the Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin is a dazzling fusion of color and composition, movement and music. There’s some strong acting, too. But the film, reputedly the most…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her 15th…
For Cruel Intentions, his directorial debut, writer Roger Kumble has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos de Laclos’ durable 18th-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons). With its focus on totally amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, often just for the hell…
There are few of us born before 1965 who wouldn’t have given our eyeteeth to be a fly on the wall of the Lincoln Room on August 7, 1974, when, on the fateful eve of Richard Nixon’s resignation, the about-to-be-former president summoned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for a late-night…
You see it in American art museums all the time: women towing men from object to object, cooing over things that make the fellers squirm or want to pull out a hammer or a chain saw. But as one official at the West Valley Art Museum/Sun Cities Museum of Art…
Director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Beaches) has always tended toward unrealistically feel-good movies, and The Other Sister is no exception. Billed as “a love story for the romantically challenged,” it concerns a mentally challenged young woman, Carla (Juliette Lewis), struggling for independence from her overprotective mother (Diane Keaton). With the…
When hit men wore hats, and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
“Honey,” Ellen Burstyn’s character in The Last Picture Show remarks to her daughter, “everything gets old if you do it often enough.” The specific activity she had in mind was sex, but the maxim applies at least as appropriately to genre conventions in movies, which even the casual moviegoer can…
thursday march 4 It’s a big week for the Phoenix Symphony: In addition to a performance by the Concorda Trio (see Sunday), an ensemble made up of PS players, and a PS Close-Up at Borders (see Monday), there’s also a concert by the whole outfit, fronted by two guest artists,…
What is there to say about writer Harlan Ellison that hasn’t already been said? Not much. The winner, probably, of more awards than any other living fantasist, whose works include I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Paingod and The Deathbird, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934 and…
Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh, Here I am at Camp Granada. Camp is very entertaining, And they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining. . . . That classical tune you were just involuntarily singing was Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” The lyrics, however, were from the pen and…
About halfway through Sister Amnesia’s Country Western Nunsense Jamboree, one of the characters turns to the audience after a particularly unfunny line and bellows, “Hey, folks, it doesn’t get much better than this.” She isn’t kidding. Dan Goggin’s second sequel to Nunsense, his far-too-frequently produced 1985 off-Broadway hit, is either…
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington, D.C., wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to from the release of The 24 Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer/director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has…
Under the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow’s near-peerless bubblegum anthem “I Want Candy.” The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving–it’s sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It’s also fun to consume, and harmless enough as long as…
What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely-but-true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower Fifties. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial-and-error-and-error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting stuck in the dying coal industry…
Twenty-five-year session man, front man and solo artist Kim Wilson’s vocal and harmonica work has clearly made him an essential ingredient of the Texas Blues. But to leave it at that would discredit his contribution to blues as a whole. Any blues fan can tell you how powerfully Wilson–whose shows…
Eric Bogosian’s rant hits with all the subtlety of an ice pick to the brain stem. For more than an hour, he’s alone on stage, dressed in black, chewing razor blades and spitting the shards into the audience, assuming identities you’d cross the street to avoid. The actor/playwright’s one-man shows…
thursday february 25 Hermann Michael conducts the Phoenix Symphony in an all-Mozart program, including the “Three German Dances K. 605”; Ch’io mi scordi di te?; Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major; Exsultate jubilate; and Symphony No. 35 in D Major, a.k.a. “Haffner.” Soprano Patrice Michaels Bedi and Naumberg Competition-winning…
You knew Olympia Dukakis was an Oscar- and Obie-winning actor. You saw her in Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias and in many other films. So what’s she doing acting as creative consultant to a San Francisco dance troupe that’s making a new work here in Phoenix? No scripts in the offing?…
I may see another show this season that I like as well as Raised in Captivity, but I doubt it. With this production, the folks at Planet Earth Theatre have succeeded in untangling the extravagant imagination of playwright Nicky Silver, and have spun his words into a comedy that’s alternately…
Plot is a central problem in both Jawbreaker and Office Space, two comedies opening this week: The first has too much; and the second (and far better of the two movies) has too little. Jawbreaker’s 26-year-old writer/director Darren Stein says he wanted to make an homage to the films he…
