Sat 6/7 Everyone who wears purple dies — at least in the Studio One production of The Curse of the Purple Tutu, choreographed by Studio One founder Melissa Cesarano. The curse afflicts all those who wear garments made of a purple fabric robbed from the grave of a woman long…
The life of a standup comedian is a study in simultaneous courage and masochism. Endless strings of one-nighters at clubs with names like The Funny Bone, Chuckles, and Haha’s; audiences expecting laughs on demand; and the occasional heckler make for a profession that easily excludes the faint of heart. In…
You’ve been warned: This is a column about politics wherein a popular-culture critic (dunno what that is either, but says so on my tax returns) interviews a former rock journalist-turned-publicist-turned-band-manager-turned-record-label-executive about how the Democratic Party alienated everyone under the age of death. You may take this with a grain of…
Another week, another remake — summer, that season of air-conditioned originality, must be upon us. Only unlike The In-Laws, which creaked into theaters last week, this latest updating of a decades-old action-comedy has two things going for it: Its forebear is a veddy British caper film little-seen in the United…
Matt Dillon learned his lesson early: Suck up to the Hollywood fat cats, and you’ll keep working. From his adolescent launch in the troubled-teen flick Over the Edge to dalliances with Francis Ford Coppola, Garry Marshall, Gene Hackman and Michael Douglas, the actor has been everybody’s boy. Now, as star,…
If grown-ups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disneyfolk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
In the midst of a hyperpatriotic era in which the dual crimes of independent thinking and dissent are often labeled as un-American, the award for “best irony and social commentary in a name” goes to the good folks who hung the moniker on Phoenix’s own Thought Crime Gallery. Not afraid…
Thursday, May 29 Many celebrities owe their success to the early-’90s TV variety show In Living Color: the Wayans brothers, Jim Carrey, David Alan Grier, Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez. Tommy Davidson can also include himself in that list, having launched to stardom as one of the comedy hit’s original…
There is nothing more uncommon than common sense. — Frank Lloyd Wright Wright was right. One needs only to glimpse the multitudes of golf courses, swimming pools and artificial lakes here in our desert to know that he was right. A house that faces west still makes us Arizona natives…
Turn up the heat at the cool Celebrity Theatre, as Midgetmania and Divas Unleashed hit the Valley of the Sun at 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 30 (rescheduled from May 29). The music, the costumes and the excitement of big-time wrestling explode in full measure. Monitored by a mini-referee, favorite little…
Springing from the page to the stage, Seussical the Musical has more star power than a beach full of Sneetches stamped by Sylvester McMonkey McBean’s tattooing machine. “Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches/Had bellies with stars./The Plain-Belly Sneetches/Had none upon thars,” wrote Dr. Seuss in his story about the hypercritical creatures’ quest…
The art salon is not, after all, a thing of the past. ArtsAz and its director Ernest McIntyre figured this out long ago, and every month hold the FirstMondays Art Salon, an ongoing series of free public programs at the Burton Barr Central Library. This month’s artist, Lisa Takata, is…
Colorado’s reigning kings of Americana are amping up the sound that prompted Denver Post readers to vote them the state’s “best alt-country band.” According to Rainville front man John Common, the group is “heading into an indie-rock-inspired kind of gritty rock ‘n’ roll territory.” Common promises a preview of the…
The last show I remember at the old space that once housed Art Lab 16 was so haunting, it’s never left my mind. The storefront on East Roosevelt Street was nothing to look at; even today, the thing you notice first is the weatherworn corrugated aluminum covering the front window…
Sedona resident Bruce Licher’s instrumental aggregate Scenic is breaking a two-and-a-half-year performance hiatus at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s opening reception for “southwestNET: architecture and design” on Thursday, May 29, followed by an encore performance the next evening at Modified Arts. Scenic, whose lineup includes Stinkweeds Records and Modified…
Anyone confused about the difference between a circus clown and a politician should steer clear of husband-and-wife portrait artists Michael and Cassandra Skomer. The Phoenix duo have made a name for themselves in galleries far and wide with their wacky watercolors, in which they transform politicos into face-painted circus performers…
Black Theatre Troupe has scored another hit with its all-around pleasant production of Blues in the Night at the Herberger Theater Center. While the company has turned out several engaging dramas these past few seasons, its attempts to sell a decent musical have been less notable. This one, though, is…
A couple of hours before the curtain went up on opening night of Parade, a publicist from Theater Works phoned to say that that evening’s performance had been rescheduled as a final dress rehearsal. In Theater land, this is never a good sign. It usually means that the show is…
He, like, didn’t get laid while the cameras were rolling, but dude! Matt Slenske did get totally baked in The Real Cancun, the world’s first-ever reality movie. The latest entry in the race for reality programming, The Real Cancun — now tanking at a theater near you — features three…
Alot of moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that — at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie was…
The Chicago-based filmmaker Steve James rose to prominence in 1994 with Hoop Dreams, a gritty, uncomfortably intimate portrait of two inner-city kids who try to escape poverty and deprivation through basketball. Shot over four years, it was at once a stirring indictment of the social services bureaucracy, a tribute to…
When Kathy Tweet decided to experiment with her Improbable Theatre Company, the audition notice read: “Calling all drama kings and queens.” She got seven kings and queens to be part of a collectively autobiographical narrative called Actual Lives: Candid Snapshots, which will be performed in the Herberger Theater Center’s Lunch…
