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…
thursday april 1 According to Joe Louis’ autobiography, the title confab of Black Theatre Troupe’s new production, Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting, really happened. Ed Schmidt’s play, directed by Douglas Alan-Mann, tells the story of a 1947 conference called by Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey in which he asks other…
Last month, the Sundome was visited by Bully, a touring show with John Davidson, solus, as Teddy Roosevelt. This weekend, Scottsdale Center for the Arts hosts another one-person show, about another Roosevelt: Eleanor–Her Secret Journey. The famed first lady is played by Jean Stapleton, beloved for a more blue-collar role,…
At this writing, it’s still too early to tell whether the new edition of CBS’ The Late Late Show, with smart aleck Craig Kilborn replacing schmooze master Tom Snyder, will produce huzzahs, or a nationwide voicing of the question, “I wonder who’s on Conan tonight?” If the new host seems…
Mimes are usually mute and wave gloved hands in the air. Actors pretend to be someone–anyone–else. Yet you never know what to expect from performance artists. One day they’re masturbating in a gallery. Another, they’re having a friend shoot them in the arm with a gun, or ranting about their…
Those who enjoy wasting time and money on one spectacularly horrible theater production per season shouldn’t miss Insurrection: Holding History. This perfectly execrable one-act is a co-production of Planet Earth Theatre and the Black Theatre Troupe, a fact that implicates twice as many theater hobbyists and proves that old adage…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavyset middle-aged actor who…
Imagine a bunch of kids watching the classic 1956 film musical The King and I on television, then going outside and spending the rest of the afternoon acting it out in the backyard. Apart from a lack of hired-gun Broadway voices performing the songs, their re-creation might not be too…
So you’ve seen all the Oscar winners and also-rans, and you’ve caught up with whatever might vaguely be interesting among current releases. Don’t panic, you needn’t resort to Wing Commander yet–there’s a surprisingly rich assortment of festival films from which to choose in the Valley this week. The most notable…
“It’s a serious subject, and people tend to put it in this sort of serious shelf,” says Rodrigo Duarte Clark. “But life doesn’t stop being humorous just because people are dying. There’s a lot of humor in the play. You don’t want to immerse people so much in their emotions…
thursday march 25 In Paula Vogel’s drama How I Learned to Drive, a teenage girl known as Li’l Bit is taught to drive by her Uncle Peck in ’60s-era Maryland. Arizona Theatre Company mounts this Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of sexual abuse, directed by David Ira Goldstein. Opening performances are at…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale out of mismatched ingredients–a rigged card game, a hydroponics marijuana…
At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby, 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
thursday march 18 Some time ago, the nice folks at Mesa Southwest Museum sent this reporter a chocolate coin with a roasted cricket in it, and invited me to join the “I Ate a Bug Club.” I did–it tasted not unlike a Nestle’s Crunch–and, as a proud member of that…
In homage to a half-dozen of the most formidable women in the history of 20th-century art, a half-dozen of the Phoenix area’s more formidable performing artists and arts educators will assume their personas for an unusual interactive performance-art role-playing piece titled “Women Who Do!” Confused? Okay, it works like this…
Putting together a new theater company with a performance space to call your own in the Phoenix area is an exercise in frustration. No one is in a better position to attest to this truism than Michael Alessandro, head honcho and guiding force for Feast of Fools Theatre. In the…
