The smallish audience with whom I saw Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: The Stage Production seemed, on the whole, to enjoy it. I say this in the interest of fairness, before I confess that I fled the theater after the second act–the end of the “Gold Watch” segment. The show made…
In the past, I’ve carped about Arizona Jewish Theatre Company’s lamentable productions and its less-than-kosher choice of material. But the company more than makes up for past indiscretions with its current staging of Jonathan Tolins’ modern morality play The Twilight of the Golds. Unlike AJTC’s usual lite fare, Twilight is…
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well onscreen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but in…
Back in the ’60s and ’70s, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of live-action “family” comedies (No Deposit, No Return and Freaky Friday, for instance) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s latest film, Krippendorf’s Tribe, is very much…
thursday february 26 Phoenix Art and Antique Show: A dizzying array of bric-a-brac, objets, macguffins and other assorted knickknacks from 43 galleries around the U.S. and Europe is exhibited and sold for the benefit of Phoenix Art Museum in this inaugural event. The goodies on display include American furniture, porcelain,…
I attended The Heiress, a play about lost love, on Valentine’s Day in the company of a couple of reformed bachelors. Until recently, each of us had bombed at romance, and had resigned himself to whatever the equivalent of male spinsterhood is. Our postplay discussion–about leading with your heart instead…
Shakespeare purists or anyone who groans upon hearing the word “deconstruction” should stay far away from Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief, the latest offering from In Mixed Company. Playwright Paula Vogel’s hilarious one-act takes a sidelong glance at Othello, and asks: What were Desdemona and her gal pals up…
When and if humans make first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, the experience may have this much in common with Sphere: It could quite possibly be confusing and unsatisfying. But if it’s anywhere near so cliched, why bother? That Sphere is based on a Michael Crichton novel is not, in itself,…
Brazilian director Bruno Barreto is best known on these shores for the lush romanticism of the Sonia Braga travelogues Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Gabriela, and in his country for teen fluff like The Boy From Rio. With the Oscar-nominated Four Days in September, he’s likely to establish…
thursday february 19 Wolfgang Plays Wolfgang: Phoenix Symphony’s principal bassoonist Bonnie Wolfgang, a 22-year veteran of the orchestra, gets a much-deserved moment in the spotlight. She plays Wolfgang Mozart’s Concerto for Bassoon–the composer’s only extant concerto for solo bassoon, and his first concerto for a wind instrument–in this concert, which…
It’s a testimony to the talents of director Marshall W. Mason that the opening-night crowd for King Lear stayed to cheer his achievement. Because, despite Mason’s expertise, this Arizona State University production of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy trades each triumph for a disaster: While the sets are wonderful, the costumes…
A cappella except for hand-clapping, Taj Mahal growls “John the Revelator” under the titles of Blues Brothers 2000. That was enough to make me glad I had gone. What I didn’t expect was how many other reasons followed. The Blues Brothers, 1980’s feature-length treatment of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers on the hunt for cutting-edge fantasies look back–they visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos, or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-’90s, the English company Working Title Films made…
thursday february 12 Desdemona–A Play About a Handkerchief: This “deconstruction” of Shakespeare’s Othello by playwright Paula Vogel posits the Moor’s hapless wife as a “spoiled and self-centered” pill who “struts around like a sorority queen reveling in her tales of sexual conquest; ever mindful that the one man she hasn’t…
Set in 19th-century Australia, this tale of two gamblers–Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glass-works owner–is too wispy to be an art thing and too heavy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop. The “Prince Rupert drop” cannot be smashed with a sledgehammer but…
John Woo has generated plenty of American disciples in the decade since his Hong Kong action films began playing film festivals in the West. Even before he began his Hollywood career with 1993’s Hard Target, bits of his action shtick started showing up in the work of savvy young filmmakers,…
As The Apostle’s title character, E.F. “Sonny” Dewey, writer-director Robert Duvall never stops moving and never speaks in a voice lower than a roar. He runs in place, dances when standing still, hollers even when he whispers; he vibrates. Sonny’s a true tent-revival preacher, spitting brimstone threats and heavenly promises…
thursday february 5 The Old 97’s/The Gourds: Both of these Texas outfits crank out curious, likable hybrids of folk, country and rock. The 97’s, based in Dallas, are touring behind their Elektra release Too Far to Care. As for the Austin-based Gourds, any band that titles a song “I Ate…
White Picket Fence is a show that’s built for failure. For starters, it’s a dramedy about race relations in which the principal characters are two 8-year-old boys played by grown men. In its premier production, the play is being co-produced by competing theater companies, a tricky proposition for which there’s…
In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens’ 1861 novel is very loosely updated and transposed to Florida’s Gulf Coast and Manhattan. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this film an adaptation–at its best, it’s more like a…
thursday january 29 Phoenix Symphony: Though his songs remain widely popular with performers, composer Kurt Weill is one of the relatively unsung–in the other sense of the term–geniuses of 20th-century music. He was even dissed, posthumously, by his longtime collaborator Bertolt Brecht. Weill’s stinging, brilliant work is featured in this…
It’s ironic that Phoenix Theatre is making such a big deal of Crooners–unlike the company’s other musical hits Forever Plaid and The Taffetas–being a book musical rather than a revue. Press materials stress that Crooners does more than just string together popular songs of a certain era; it tells a…
