When the members of the San Francisco Actors Workshop went to San Quentin prison one day in 1957 to perform Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for the convicts, it’s doubtful they could have anticipated the reception they received. Rick Cluchey, who was serving a life term at the institution for…
There are few theatrical experiences more gratifying than watching a talented young artist fulfill his promise. Theatergoers who saw David Drake performing his off-Broadway smash The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me in 1991 were witness to that rare occurrence. In a little more than an hour, audiences saw Drake rant…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
It’s tempting to say the Heard Museum’s new $18.1 million expansion has transformed the institution. But you don’t have to wander very far through its updated galleries and hallways to hear visitors saying the same old things about the art and artifacts they can’t readily identify. Down one corridor: “Is…
The woman in line ahead of me for Phoenix Theatre’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? turned to me just before buying her tickets. “I don’t even know what this play is about,” she confided. When I told her it’s about two married couples who get drunk and scream…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action, and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must–create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem!) think deeply–although this…
It takes a few minutes’ worth of patience to get to the pleasures of Wrestling With Alligators, the feature debut of writer-director Laurie Weltz. The prologue may have you checking your watch before the credits are over. The characters are introduced, cavorting on the beach in that same sort of…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal, and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme from…
It’s a good weekend for those whom George Bernard Shaw dubbed “Bardolators”–there’s plenty of Shakespeare on tap. Enthusiasts need to act quickly, though, as it’s the wrap-up weekend for the runs of all of the productions described below. Southwest Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It the Bard’s romantic…
If he weren’t so creative with a pen, a microphone and a Hohner, James Harman would be a most apt author of a how-to-do-life manual. Not the Colangelo version, mind you, though there are similarities. Both men, for instance, have a big streak of upbeat humor–Harman’s, which pours out of…
thursday april 15 Lanford Wilson’s influential play Balm in Gilead, set in the bustle of a Lower East Side coffee shop among, in the author’s words, “the riffraff, the bums, the petty thieves, the scum, the lost, the desperate, the dispossessed, the cool,” is presented by the Arizona State University…
Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late ’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After…
Steve Martin says he doesn’t want audiences to expect the same old Steve Martin whenever he stars in a comedy. But that means one thing when he’s referring to Roxanne and L.A. Story, two inspired flights of romantic farce (based on his own scripts), and another when he’s talking about…
Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to go back and relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom, and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a…
The people in France must be smart, the old joke goes; even the children speak French. If people who’ve learned to speak French are thought of as being erudite, they’re also stereotyped as being pompous and short on horse sense–as in the bit on Frasier where Frasier and his brother,…
Despite my hard-earned reputation as a bigmouth, I didn’t audition for Politically Incorrect when producers from the show came to Phoenix last week. I was present as an observer, however, as 50 or so other voluble Valley locals tried out for the role of “citizen panelist” on the April 12…
thursday april 8 The signature joke formula of the frequently brilliant young comedienne Wendy Liebman is the added phrase that makes an initially innocuous remark go bad. “I’m a writer,” Liebman will say, in her prim yet spacy voice, and then, as if to herself, she’ll add, “I write checks…
Legend has it that, in 1947, Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey gathered together the most influential black men in America in one cramped hotel room. The story goes that these men–Joe Louis, Paul Robeson and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson–met to discuss Rickey’s pending announcement that Jackie Robinson would be joining the…
At the end of the 20th century, no life is allowed to go unexamined, and none of us is permitted to claim a clean bill of mental health. Talk show hosts, self-help authors and amateur radio docs tell us we’re not well-balanced, we’re delusional, we didn’t have happy childhoods, we’re…
10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew set at a modern-day high school, may have pioneered the idea of turning Shakespeare into teen comedy. But it is far from the first film to update or rework one of the Bard’s plots to fit…
The teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You gets off to a nice peppy start thanks to a burst of “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies under the titles, but the song gets cut off halfway through. The plot suffers the same fate. The first quarter of the film–the exposition…
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut claimed that this was the moral of his novel Mother Night. As it happens, he was specifically referring to Nazis–the hero of that short book was an American-born resident of Germany…
