A Midsummer Night’s Dream came early in Shakespeare’s career. He had written it by at least 1598, in roughly the same period as another lyric-romantic masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet. Despite Samuel Pepys’ famous dismissal of Dream as “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” it…
thursday may 6 Veteran comic Jackie Mason–namesake of Oxford’s postgraduate Jackie Mason Lectureship in Contemporary Judaism–brings his show “Much Ado About Everything” to the Valley at 8 p.m. Thursday, May 6; the same time Friday, May 7; and Saturday, May 8; and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 9, at the Orpheum…
My eldest sister–though she is herself the wonderful mother of two devoted daughters, and the devoted daughter of a wonderful mother–once told me that she had no special attachment to the idea of Mother’s Day. Her reasoning: “If your kids are nice to you all year round, then you don’t…
thursday april 29 Seventeen of the Valley’s top harp-blowers–Bill Tarsha, Dave Trippy, Roy Pinn, The Root Doctor, Mississippi Catfish, Bill Frain, Gypsy, Mark “Moose” Mallet, Dave Tank Taylor, George Pappas, Diana Lee, Big Nick, Dwight Miles, Harmonica Mark, Sarge Lintecum, Larry Dee and venue honcho Bob Corritore–take the stage for…
Remember Keiko Ibi, the pretty Japanese woman who gave the touching acceptance speech after she won for Best Documentary Short at this year’s Oscars? The chance to see her 37-minute winning film, The Personals, on a big screen comes up this weekend, when it’s shown as part of the Saguaro…
Based on the first Julian Barnes novel, Metroland is essentially a dramatization of the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”: “You may find yourself/In a beautiful house/With a beautiful wife/You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?” The hero of Metroland spends the movie asking himself that question,…
When the members of the San Francisco Actors Workshop went to San Quentin prison one day in 1957 to perform Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for the convicts, it’s doubtful they could have anticipated the reception they received. Rick Cluchey, who was serving a life term at the institution for…
thursday april 22 Standup guy Joe Rogan, best known as the gadget master on TV’s NewsRadio, takes the stage at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 22; 8 and 10 p.m. Friday, April 23; 8 and 10 p.m. Saturday, April 24; and 8 p.m. Sunday, April 25, at the Tempe Improv Comedy…
A “spectacular and thoughtful accolade to the Southwest” is how Ballet Arizona artistic director Michael Uthoff describes The Legends, with which the company wraps up its 1998-99 season. This program features two new works about this region and its native peoples, one scheduled to be choreographed by Uthoff to an…
The heroine of Roland Joffe’s comic noir Goodbye Lover is Sandra, a modern femme fatale for whom seduction, murder and double-crossing are as natural as her severe blond china doll hairstyle is artificial. She’s the heroine of the story, that is; the heroine of the production is Patricia Arquette, who…
thursday april 15 Lanford Wilson’s influential play Balm in Gilead, set in the bustle of a Lower East Side coffee shop among, in the author’s words, “the riffraff, the bums, the petty thieves, the scum, the lost, the desperate, the dispossessed, the cool,” is presented by the Arizona State University…
It’s a good weekend for those whom George Bernard Shaw dubbed “Bardolators”–there’s plenty of Shakespeare on tap. Enthusiasts need to act quickly, though, as it’s the wrap-up weekend for the runs of all of the productions described below. Southwest Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It the Bard’s romantic…
It takes a few minutes’ worth of patience to get to the pleasures of Wrestling With Alligators, the feature debut of writer-director Laurie Weltz. The prologue may have you checking your watch before the credits are over. The characters are introduced, cavorting on the beach in that same sort of…
thursday april 8 The signature joke formula of the frequently brilliant young comedienne Wendy Liebman is the added phrase that makes an initially innocuous remark go bad. “I’m a writer,” Liebman will say, in her prim yet spacy voice, and then, as if to herself, she’ll add, “I write checks…
Despite my hard-earned reputation as a bigmouth, I didn’t audition for Politically Incorrect when producers from the show came to Phoenix last week. I was present as an observer, however, as 50 or so other voluble Valley locals tried out for the role of “citizen panelist” on the April 12…
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…
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,…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
