Chow Bella does not intend heartless disrespect toward the loved ones of any suicidal junkie porn stars, particularly of the late Savannah née Shannon Michelle Wilsey, who reportedly took her porn name from her favorite film, 1982’s Savannah Smiles, which starred a little girl named Bridgette Andersen who also grew…
A good friend of mine used to manage a bookstore. (A lot of people used to manage a bookstore.) In their proud, intellectual geekiness, her employees tended to look just terrible. It wasn’t that anyone expected them to spend money on clothes; if they’d just made the effort to be…
Naomi Benaron makes us sick. She’s an author who’s good at other stuff — a geophysicist, seismologist, MIT and Scripps graduate, activist, and triathlete. If she didn’t write absorbing fiction, she’d swill free drinks and tell stories all day, and that blows. Instead, Benaron won the 2010 Bellwether Prize, an…
Hearing Actors Theatre managing director Erica McKibben Black tell Sunday’s matinee audience that the rest of this season is on was a lovely way to greet the new year. Though they fell just a smidge short of what they needed to raise by December 31, the company’s planning and restructuring…
Women tend to remember what they were wearing at life’s big moments. (Maybe men do, too.) It’s probably because some outfits are very carefully chosen, and because some events really carve in stone the memory of things like those million little buttons or cuffed ivory ankle boots or the skirt…
As Arizona approaches its centennial, another anniversary looms: one year since 19 people, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, were shot at a public event on the north edge of Tucson. On Monday, January 9, author Tom Zoellner (a friend of Giffords and her family) will appear at Tempe’s Changing Hands…
Arizona, the youngest of the 48 contiguous states, turns 100 years old on February 14. A more somber anniversary is on this week’s horizon: one year since January 8, 2011, when 19 people, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, were shot during a Congress on Your Corner public event at a…
Tom Zoellner, an Arizona-raised author and former newspaper writer who’s been critically recognized for his works on uranium and diamonds, has written a deeply personal book about the January 8, 2011, shooting of Arizona’s U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (and 18 other people, six of whom were killed) at a public…
Post-holiday blahs are so 2011. Look at the January calendar! So many interesting plays to see. Some of them are bound to take you by surprise. For example, learning that there’s a two-character musical based on the 1912 novel that inspired the Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs was not…
Though it’s been a wild, wonderful year of theatergoing, and the very best shows were better than ever, I found it unusually easy to narrow the best down to fewer than 20. For what that’s worth. Also, let’s acknowledge that we’re talking about live, ephemeral art here. Unfortunately, if you…
Either you like Trans-Siberian Orchestra or you don’t. Either way, they kick a certain amount of ass, especially in their spectacle-heavy live shows. And how cool is it to be able to pretend you’re a rocker at a Christmas concert? Find out (or recapture the thrill) on Friday, December 30,…
Wow, 2011’s nearly over. If you’re desperate to improve your tax situation, you have just a couple of days to decide how. How . . . about giving some money to the arts? (This does not constitute professional financial advice.) As we’ve been mentioning, some of the best theater companies…
We know you’re crazy busy this time of year, and so are local theater companies. With very few revivals of Curtains-approved holiday extravaganzas on the boards in 2011, we ran around and checked out as many of the current crop of offerings as we could.Here are three plays and a…
We’re thinking that being a crocodile at Christmas must be a lot like being a little Jewish kid: It’s so not about you, but you don’t necessarily care all that much. Until Adam Sandler writes a song about it (“Donald Trump who’s got a billion? He’s one-sixteenth crocodilian”), crocodiles and…
We know you’re crazy busy this time of year, and so are local theater companies. With very few revivals of Curtains-approved holiday extravaganzas on the boards in 2011, we ran around and checked out as many of the current crop of offerings as we could. Here are four plays running through the weekend…
Tape is only the second theater production at Tempe’s Venue 104, which, sadly, closes for good at the end of this month. The loss of the cafe/bar/gallery/theater/music venue is particularly sad because Michael Peck and company were doing such solid work and their dream (at least the part that featured…
If you’re intimate enough to be exchanging gifts with either a fan or a practitioner of theater, you know that “they” can be extremely … uh, particular. They tend to feel misunderstood, so you’ll score huge friendship points if you give a gift that shows you get them. Here are…
Considering how Arizona Curriculum Theater seriously creeps us out every October with Poefest, they should be able to warm and cheer us with Yuletide, a presentation of early holiday music by the Bartholomew Faire combo along with readings by Jason Barth, Danette D’Anjou, and James David Porter of old poems…
It’s time, once again, to be amused, shocked, and educated into humility by adults playing characters who are children, so who better than Louis Farber, who played the title role in NewBrave Theatre’s Mr. Marmalade, to direct MilkMilkLemonade for Stray Cat Theatre? Every performer in this show is playing something…
Know why shopping feels like a job? You’re stuck indoors with bad food and everything boring and bland. Play hooky from all that on Wednesday, December 14, when Get Your PHX co-hosts Phoestivus Market at Phoenix Public Market from 4 to 8:30 p.m. Unlike the Seinfeld universe’s alterna-holiday, this celebration…
I have to say right away that the heading above is a summary of the plot and theme of this play, not a critique of the acting in the current production of Lauren Marshall’s translation/adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope by the ASU School of Theatre and Film. The writing and…
It’s often possible to take a work of dramatic literature that’s simply dated — i.e., very much of the time when it was created, to the extent that it seems weird and awkward now — present it in a reverentially historically accurate setting, and help communicate the atmosphere or the…
