What are audience members in for when they go to a performance by Essential Theatre Company? “They’re going to experience stories from their lives,” says artistic director and performer Susan Southard. “Stories from the audience become the works of art that are performed.” More specifically, it works like this: Members…
The clock is ticking for Tempe’s College Street Garden, which for 25 years has been operated by green-thumbed members of the community, including the Kids Garden Club. Employing a “multi-phase organic composting system and several different methods of chemical-free gardening,” the half-acre garden has, over time, been built up into…
thursday june 24 ASU theater student A.J. Morales is the author of the cycle of six plays about cars, ranging in length from five to 40 minutes, collectively known as Automotivations. The one-acts, with titles like Stuck, Grease Monkey, Merge, Design, Pull Up to the Light and Maker and Model,…
thursday june 17 Comic and masterful impersonator Craig Shoemaker–his repertoire includes ace renditions of Don Knotts and Patrick Stewart–returns to the Valley, the location at which his concert film The Lovemaster was shot, for a four-night stand touring behind his riotous CD Son of Lovemaster. The pick of the American…
It guards the door, like something out of whimsical sci-fi: a ferocious-looking dog pieced together out of rusted-out automobile parts. Shock absorbers form the legs, the body and head are some crazy amalgam of engine guts, and screws provide the bared fangs in the perpetually snarling mouth. The only variation…
In most parts of this planet, the arrival of the day of the year when the sun is out the longest is a cause for celebration. Here in Arizona, though, the Summer Solstice usually means nothing other than a few more minutes of punishing heat before evening cools things off…
Disney departed from its usual practice of basing its big animated features on classic literature or myth when it made what has proved to be one of the studio’s most popular films ever, The Lion King. Yet, just barely beneath its surface, that film had a streak of xenophobia carried…
When grown-ups talk about their childhood summers, however fondly they speak of baseball games or camping or trips to amusement parks, no nostalgia of this sort usually seems able to compete with their memories of moviegoing. Not much beats hanging out in a movie theater during the hot months, getting…
Looking at Vicki Schimmel today, a vibrant woman bouncing her baby son in her lap as she talks enthusiastically over lunch about her upcoming project, it’s hard to imagine her not being functional, much less suffering a nervous breakdown. But her life ground to a halt in just that way…
thursday june 10 “I used to think that if you did an hour on TV, you couldn’t go and do that same hour live. But I’ve learned the opposite is true. That’s precisely the hour audiences want you to do. There’s this feeling that if you did it on TV,…
thursday june 3 Bona fide show-biz legend Mickey Rooney plays the title role in The Wizard of Oz when a touring stage version of the L. Frank Baum tale comes to the Valley. Jo Anne Worley, the wild woman of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, plays that embodiment of Midwestern evil,…
Asked if the emotional pain that suffuses so many of her songs comes from real pain in her life, Jill Cohn offers a common-sense answer: “Oh, sure. It would seem strange to me, actually, to sing about someone else’s pain.” Having made the interviewer feel like a fool–without meaning to–the…
Deja vu is usually a sign of love at first sight. Says who? Says the heroine of The Thirteenth Floor to the hero that she’s on the verge of kissing. Though they’ve just met a scene or two earlier, they both feel they’ve seen each other before. That maxim about…
Remember Andy Robinson, the busy, reliable character actor who played, among many, many other roles, the psycho killer in the original Dirty Harry, and Liberace in an ’80s TV movie? Turns out he has an active fan club, on the strength of his connection to–guess what?–Star Trek. Robinson plays the…
Thursday May 27 To Jeff Dunham’s usual repertory company–fuzzy “Woozle” Peanut, crotchety old-timer Walter and pepper-on-a-stick Jose Jalapeno–the comedian and ventriloquist has added two new characters: Larry, who’s all a-jitter over the Y2K problem, and Bubba, a bucktoothed, freckle-faced rustic type. The lot of them takes the stage at 8…
Well, that time is upon us once again–the time of season finales, the time when dedicated sofa tubers harvest the big dramatic payoffs and revelations and cliffhangers we’ve earned with a season of gazing rapt at the TV screen. By the time you read this, Ally McBeal will have whined…
Every two years, optimists and noncynics of various races and backgrounds get together and hold a National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution. In what some might find a rich social and political irony, the Valley has been chosen as the site of the biennial event this time around–it runs…
thursday may 20 Sometimes referred to as “The Freddy Krueger of Comedy,” the comedian-magician better known as The Amazing Jonathan plays the Valley this weekend. The performer, veteran of Letterman, Arsenio and such NBC specials as World’s Wildest Magicians and World’s Greatest Magic II, favors gruesome shock illusions, like chewing…
Tony Bui sounds like what he is: an American. The soft-spoken 26-year-old filmmaker grew up in the Silicon Valley–specifically, Sunnyvale–and went to school at Loyola Marymount. But for his debut feature, Three Seasons (see review on this page), Bui returned to the country he left when he was 2 years…
thursday may 13 Athens, Georgia-based instrumental-surf-rockabilly-pop-punk blend The Woggles, touring in support of their Telstar Records CD Wailin’ With the Woggles, hit the Valley on Thursday, May 13, at Mustang Sally’s, 1212 East Apache in Tempe. Doors open at 9 p.m.; the 21-and-over show starts at 10. Erector Set, and…
From now on, when Robert Schimmel sits down to swap war stories with other comics, he’ll have one that’s hard to top. Could there be a much tougher room to play than a comedy club in Denver, barely a week after the Littleton shootings? To make that audience laugh takes…
“See? You thought I was the only crazy one.” A young man was saying this to his girlfriend or wife as, dumbstruck, she surveyed the long line that stretched from the front door of the Toys “R” Us at Metrocenter, around the corner and down the south side of the…
