7/3-8/23 Lions and tigers and a buffet? Oh, my. Starting Thursday, July 3, Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre West, 5247 East Brown in Mesa, presents The Wizard of Oz. No word on whether the production will be timed, like the film, in synch with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon,…
6/20-7/27 Hey, Mom and Dad, does your mini-me have too much rock and not enough opera in his cultural stew? Strike a balance by checking out In the Kingdom of Clouds, a rock opera for and performed by kids at Scottsdale’s Desert Stages Children’s Theatre, 8473 East McDonald. Written by…
Fri 6/20 Central Phoenix’s cultural revival just keeps getting better. Enter Fate, a new restaurant venture by the proprietor of Tempe’s Lucky Dragon. Lucky Dragon has consistently maintained an eclectic atmosphere, cultivated via art shows, live music and DJ nights. The vegan-friendly Fate, at 905 North Fourth Street, just around…
6/20-6/22 For jocks itching to get in the game — whether that game is baton twirling or BMX bike racing — the Grand Canyon State Summer Games serve up sports of all sorts. From Friday, June 20, through Sunday, June 22, some 9,000 amateur athletes will compete in 37 events…
On a recent Sunday evening, a good while after dusk, the artist known simply as Rodgell led a caravan of cyclists to his downtown Tempe studio to unveil his latest work, a mounted sculpture of a steam locomotive coming out of a wall, its headlight lit, and behind it a…
Any soccer team that can attract players from all over the world to play during Phoenix’s hellish summer must have something going for it. The aptly named Arizona Heatwave, an amateur women’s soccer club in the United Soccer League’s western division, plays its home opener against the Denver Lady Cougars…
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…
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…
5-28-6/19 This week the watchdogs of the Phoenix art scene will drop their bones and let you have a look at what they’ve been up to. Opening Wednesday, May 28, “Sentinels: The Exhibition” is a mixed-media exhibition compiled by the likes of Janet de Berge Lange, Joel Coplin, Jeff Falk,…
5/165/17 Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Elvis Presley has been swimming in it since his death in 1977. From his hip-swiveling ’50s maverick, shown on TV only from the waist up, to his jumpsuit-wearing dinner show crooner of the Vegas years, Elvis provided poseurs with multiple personas…
5/8-5/31 With boldly colored canvases recently hung on the pristine white walls, David White, owner and director of downtown’s New Urban Art, beams with satisfaction at the work in his new exhibition. “This is optimistic art,” he says.Indeed, the work from Berlin-based Jean Milu Truesdale, Italian-born Marco Casentini, and prominent…
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a female-fronted three-piece from (where else?) Brooklyn, are being hyped as the latest saviors of raw fucking rock ‘n’ roll, especially in Tony Blair’s kingdom, where mania over the garage-rock phenom runs high. They come to us as yet another American garage-rock tsunami in the wake of…
Congress was cheered when it passed a bill last month to combat child abductions. But local concert promoters are only gradually becoming aware that the legislation, signed into law by President Bush last week, contained a sucker punch they didn’t see coming. Bush signed the Protect Act of 2003 with…
Thu 5/1 We’ve thought long and hard about it — there’s no other puppet show quite like Puppetry of the Penis. When was the last time you saw such a ballsy performance?There’s a strong buzz about this stage show that’s selling out theaters from London to New York to Los…
4/25-4/27 Tempe’s finally found a perfect sport to host: AVP Pro Beach Volleyball hits the (imported) sand at Tempe Town Lake Friday, April 25, through Sunday, April 27. Young, tanned athletes who compete in swimwear, then go out and party at night, are so much more appropriate for Playboy’s “number-one…
Saddle Creek, the Omaha, Nebraska, label that is home to Cursive, Bright Eyes, Desaparecidos, the Good Life, the Faint, and Rilo Kiley, recently celebrated its 50th release by compiling a double-CD sampler of its bands, each of whom contribute a previously released song and a new song. Saddle Creek 50…
Cursive front man Tim Kasher recites the incident clinically. “It ended up being one of those really unusual life and art reflecting each other coincidences that we had already named the album The Ugly Organ,” Kasher says dryly. He’s describing the collapsed lung and resulting surgery that landed him in…
4/184/20 Happily ever after happens in Ballet Arizona’s season finale, Tales in Motion, which revisits Sleeping Beauty and the Prodigal Son. You remember: Princess Aurora pricks her finger on a spindle, and the castle sleeps for 100 years. Meanwhile, the Prodigal Son debauches himself in the moral equivalent of freshman…
Fri 4/18 When he heard Neil Diamond sing “Play Me,” Randy Cordeiro took him literally. The front man of Super Diamond — a trippy tribute band touted as “the alternative Neil Diamond experience” — has been rocking up Neil’s beautiful noise for more than a decade. This weekend, the fake…
4/184/19 Americans identify strongly with athletes, gaining a sort of secondhand machismo that’s often lacking in our own workaday lives. It’s funny, then, that the athletes we prop up as modern-day gladiators often are eclipsed on the toughness scale by participants of lesser-known sports, including a select group of athletes…
Sat 4/12 In 1987, escalating war forced an estimated 17,000 Sudanese boys to flee their villages, many after seeing their parents killed. Only one-third survived a 1,000-mile, three-nation journey to a Kenyan refugee camp. In the last several years, nearly 4,000 of these “Lost Boys” have been resettled in the…
Mon 4/7 So your little kid looks, acts, talks and pitches like a mini-me of Randy Johnson – we’re sorry about everything but the pitching, really… what’s a parent to do? Chances are you’d be well-served by taking the tyke (or tyke-ette) to the Major League Baseball National Pepsi Pitch,…
