A pair of famous dead singers was resuscitated here last week. Mahalia Jackson and Maria Callas are each pacing local stages — Jackson in Black Theatre Troupe’s Mahalia; Callas in Arizona Theatre Company’s Master Class — talking directly to capacity audiences about their very different lives. The productions that present…
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…
As the 20th century grinds remorselessly to a close, Princess Diana, Monica Lewinsky and JonBenet Ramsey continue to be held up by the media as signal figures of our time. Yet something tells me that when future historians look back on this period, the bulimic socialite, the kneepad-ready intern and…
If you’ve ever seen (heard) Mozart and Da Ponte’s The Marriage of Figaro, then you’ve probably already got tickets for the Arizona Opera Company’s production, or you’re gambling that it won’t sell out before you call its box office. If you hate opera, like I kinda do, but you’ve never…
P.T. would be proud. The Barnum Organization cannot have failed to notice the rise, and the smashing success, of artsy, boutique-style circuses like Cirque du Soleil and Circus Flora. Realizing that, to modify the master’s famous truism, there’s an upscale sucker born every minute, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey…
Question: What do you get when you combine a lot of talented actors with a couple of lousy scripts? Answer: Shows like those currently on display at Phoenix Theatre and Arizona Jewish Theatre Company. These programs — PT’s Twigs and AJTC’s The Gift Horse — sag under the weight of…
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and, sure, most of his films have women/girls as protagonist or savior; but this is a…
In the eyes of the general public, Michael Mann is still best-known for Miami Vice. He has received a great deal of critical acclaim for films about serial killers, Mohicans and bank robbers. So who would have guessed that his most engrossing and suspenseful film to date would be a…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twentysome years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession: More’s the pity, since…
After an impressive poetry reading last year, the YMCA Writer’s Voice of downtown Phoenix invited East Coast poet Joshua Beckman back to the Valley, this time with an offer to act as the program’s writer in residence for the fall. He accepted, and this Tuesday, Beckman will read from and…
Former Phoenix Sun Wayman Tisdale is the headliner at this year’s Cool Desert Jazz Festival. Now a full-time “smooth jazz” bassist, touring behind his Atlantic Records debut, Decisions, the 12-year veteran of the NBA tops the marquee at the fifth annual concert, on Saturday, November 13, at Estrella Mountain Ranch,…
Would that some of our more established theater companies could harness the energy bursting from the makeshift stage at Planet Earth Theatre these days. In the best “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” tradition, a group of young amateurs has pooled its talents and its affection for campy old…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Sorry to crib from that inferior tale of incredible shrinking men (throw a rock at any multiplex marquee this season — please! — and you’ll hit several), but really, avoid that…
And now . . . a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than 30 movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction. But none of them cuts as close to the bone, I suspect, as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the ’70s and carefully described by its maker as…
Dance lovers with eclectic appetites can gorge on three very different dance performances in the Valley this weekend. The tops in jazz dance, ballet and the Brazilian martial arts/dance form Capoeira could all be on your plate. River North Dance Company takes its name from a tony Chicago neighborhood bordering…
Way out west where the avenues are numbered in the triple digits, there sits ASU’s Sundome Center for the Performing Arts. Through the years, this massive performance space, located in the heart of the retirement community of Sun City West, has played host to any number of bus-and-truck productions of…
It hasn’t always been easy to pare Claude Monet’s artistic achievements from his popularity. In the later half of his life (1840 to 1926), his paintings sold so well that the writer Emile Zola suggested that he might be unloading too many unfinished works that were barely dry. More recently,…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but, as has often been…
Horned, fanged, cat-eyed and pointy-eared, the colossal green head glowered down on both lanes of I-10. Tempe Diablo Stadium, over the parking lot of which the Dante-esque visage floated, had never seemed so aptly named. “I don’t think this is the home of the Anaheim Angels today,” remarked the publicist…
Ira Glass has a story to tell you. Actually, he has lifetimes’ worth of stories to tell you. And there are a lot of people who enjoy hearing them. Beginning on Chicago’s public radio outlet in late 1995, This American Life is now heard on more than 350 stations. The…
Viewing Monet paintings on the Internet is sort of like watching Lawrence of Arabia on the TV at a Tempe sports bar. The medium is tragically inappropriate for displaying works of such subtlety and texture. On the Phoenix Art Museum’s Web site, for instance, impressionistic brush strokes and computer monitor…
