When you hear, “I’m crossover, man, Southern rock and . . . ,” or, “My thang is kinda that hiphopnewgrungefunky-type jazz thang, y’know? . . .” or, “Uh, I do strictly blues,” it’s a fair bet you’re being snowed. A good musician won’t lay style on you. He’ll just say,…
In a performance space as intimate as PlayWright’s Theatre, you can name the moment when a play has grabbed its audience. That moment came during opening night of Theatre Maxim’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, when actor April Umbrianna blurted out her character’s horrible secret. The smallish audience froze…
Forty years ago, a sculptor could stop almost any American museum crowd in its tracks by erecting an abstract tower of metal. But as times have changed, sculptural works in fabricated steel have steadily lost that allure. They haven’t suffered the infamy of collapsing on and killing college students for…
Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly, just so they could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question and perhaps one better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell strip, but it directly…
The legend “That Afternoon” appears onscreen, and then we see a car hurtle past us on a lonely desert road, hotly pursued by two Arizona Highway Patrol units. Behind the wheel, our hero Wade (Drew Pillsbury) sits with a stricken look on his face, plainly baffled at how he’s gotten…
Be forewarned: In the continuing quest to get people to pay attention to their films by any means necessary, the marketing wizards at Artisan Entertainment have been misrepresenting Felicia’s Journey to an even greater extent than the Shooting Gallery did The Minus Man (also distributed by Artisan). No doubt hoping…
Before she — or anyone else — had ever heard the term, Lily Tomlin was already a performance artist. Growing up in blue-collar Detroit, Tomlin says that she never missed a chance to dress up and do monologues for her friends and family. “I’d put on my mother’s slip, and…
They never used the name. Sinatra really hated it. Ever modest, he preferred “The Summit,” but somehow that never stuck. Back in the early ’60s, when the Chairman and a few of his best show-biz pals gathered in Las Vegas to do a movie and have a few laughs, they…
If the latest show in the back room of Lisa Sette Gallery reminds you of being hustled by souvenir vendors wielding lacy glass galleons and spray-painted plaster statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Mickey Mouse at the Tijuana-San Diego border, you’ve actually gotten the real drift of “Nouveau…
Warren McArthur knows something about the tenacity of fiction. For the past quarter century, he has been trying to undo the popular one that presents America’s über-architect Frank Lloyd Wright as the designer of the Arizona Biltmore. “My uncle Albert [Chase McArthur] was the real architect, but I guess some…
At the beginning of Spanish Fly, Zoe, the heroine, meets Antonio, who’s both Spanish and fly. Zoe’s an American writer staying in Madrid to research a book on machismo. Antonio, a blocked writer himself and a not-at-all-blocked womanizer, is her interpreter. They start bickering at once, so we know they’re…
The last time Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an apocalypse-themed action movie with a Guns n’ Roses theme song was in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the biggest and loudest action movie that had thus far ever been seen. Since that time, he’s produced one bona fide balls-to-the-wall action flick (True Lies),…
Trivia question: What Tempe comic artist is a favorite of Ben Affleck, has common bonds with Salma Hayek, and recently appeared in Kevin Smith’s Dogma? Answer: Jim Mahfood. The artist hit the national comic scene hard in April 1998 with the release of Generation X Underground for Marvel Comics, and…
With the arrival of Santa/Hanukkah Harry/Y2K still a couple of weeks off, the festive season is at its height this week, and, as a result, holiday concerts are abundant. Here’s a run-down of a few of the possibilities: Phoenix Symphony — Despite all the seasonal sounds around the Valley this…
I took more pleasure in telling people I was going to a play called Shopping and Fucking than I did from the play itself. But Planet Earth Theatre’s production of this persuasively creepy little drama — which was a huge hit in London’s West End several years ago — isn’t…
The wide-screen debut of Pokémon has two subtitles: The First Movie, which implies, with almost tragic inevitability, the promise of a Second and a Third and so on, stretching out into the infinite reaches of posterity; and Mewtwo Strikes Back, which implies almost nothing, presumably even to those immersed in…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature; it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right…
“The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly, watered-down fun of the animated Disney version, the horseman and his victim, the gangling and gallant Ichabod…
Poor old MGM — the once-golden studio that has been battered and abused by ever-changing ownership and management for nearly three decades now — still has one sure-shot franchise among its assets: the James Bond series, whose longevity is astounding. If nothing else, the series’ overseas popularity keeps the films…
If you’re among those who value New Times less for its journalistic and literary merit and more for its excellence as bedding, clothing and toilet paper, a traditional home-cooked meal or a feast at a gourmet restaurant may not be feasible for you this Thanksgiving. (Of course, there are probably…
Talk about a long, strange trip. It’s now been better than 40 years that The Kingston Trio has been on the road. With guitars and banjos in hand, these veterans of the folk music wars have been making a joyful noise across every inch of this country and around the…
Phoenix wouldn’t be Phoenix without its illusions about water. All its boats and pools and golf greens, all its fountains, irrigated farm fields and backyards have helped to turn some fairly extravagant wet dreams into everyday occurrences. That may be why last week’s formal opening of Tempe’s Rio Salado project…
