Rosie O’Donnell sure makes a believable nun. In the kids’ movie Wide Awake, she plays Sister Terry, a sports-loving teacher at a swanky private school in the Philadelphia suburbs, a sympathetic good egg in whom the troubled 10-year-old hero (Joseph Cross) confides. There’s not a minute when she isn’t convincing…
Thursday March 26 Arizona Opera concludes its 27th season with Tosca, Puccini’s convoluted work of 1900, based on Sardou’s play La Tosca, about intrigue and backstabbing and political fugitives in 17th-century Rome. The title character is a singer who, while trying to help her artist boyfriend Cavarodossi, is tricked repeatedly…
“Slick” is the word. At a glance, it would be hard to find two performances farther apart than the latest star turn of John Travolta as presidential hopeful Jack Stanton in Primary Colors, which opened last weekend, and one of his earliest, as Danny Zuko in Grease (or Vaselina, as…
Imagine an undiscovered Star Trek episode, say, from the third season, when the show’s consistency and sense of structure had grown slipshod even by its own laughable dramaturgical standards. It begins with the Enterprise routinely chasing a comet when it receives a distress call from a nearby planet–the inhabitants are…
The white-guy-as-victim school of thought has been heard everywhere including the Supreme Court, but rarely with as much gusto as in the rantings of comedian Bobby Slayton, the self-billed “Pit Bull of Comedy,” who has made a career out of butchering sacred cows, and who plays the Improv this weekend…
Steven Tyler of Aerosmith claimed that when he saw Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, it hit too close to home–he found it tragic. Waiting for Guffman, co-written and directed by and starring Spinal Tap’s Christopher Guest, has found a similar place in the hearts of theater people–particularly those who’ve…
Thursday March 19 Ever seen Santo, the masked superhero-wrestler from Mexican fantasy-horror films? Imagine four Santos playing frenzied Dick Dale/Ventures-style surf-guitar rock, and you’ve got a good picture of Los Straitjackets. Touring in support of its excellent Upstart CD Viva! Los Straitjackets!–supposedly what Quentin Tarantino cried to the band from…
thursday march 12 “Spiritscapes”: Cynthia Woody Gallery, 4151 North Marshall Way in Scottsdale, presents this display of the collage-style works of Benedictine monk turned artist Jerome Tupa. “If you’ve ever contemplated the lay of the land,” remarks the artist, “this exhibit talks to the lay of the spirit, produced in…
One of the half-dozen main characters in Tom DiCillo’s ensemble comedy The Real Blonde is obsessed with finding a literal specimen of the title rara avis, a bona fide, not-out-of-the-bottle goldilocks. Exactly what gives rise to this fetish–what would make such a woman more appealing than a rinse-job blonde–isn’t dramatized…
thursday march 5 Robert Schimmel: The Phoenix-based comic, currently touring in support of his ironically titled CD Robert Schimmel Comes Clean, talks frankly about sex and other social taboos, in the tradition of Carlin, Pryor and Bruce. He performs at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 5; 8 and 10 p.m. Friday,…
thursday february 26 Phoenix Art and Antique Show: A dizzying array of bric-a-brac, objets, macguffins and other assorted knickknacks from 43 galleries around the U.S. and Europe is exhibited and sold for the benefit of Phoenix Art Museum in this inaugural event. The goodies on display include American furniture, porcelain,…
The smallish audience with whom I saw Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: The Stage Production seemed, on the whole, to enjoy it. I say this in the interest of fairness, before I confess that I fled the theater after the second act–the end of the “Gold Watch” segment. The show made…
James Iha Let It Come Down (Virgin Records) There are a couple of different reasons longtime band members make solo albums. One is fairly legitimate: to explore musical avenues that just don’t fit on your band’s itinerary. The other reason is more ego-based. When people like Mick Jagger, George Michael…
thursday february 19 Wolfgang Plays Wolfgang: Phoenix Symphony’s principal bassoonist Bonnie Wolfgang, a 22-year veteran of the orchestra, gets a much-deserved moment in the spotlight. She plays Wolfgang Mozart’s Concerto for Bassoon–the composer’s only extant concerto for solo bassoon, and his first concerto for a wind instrument–in this concert, which…
When and if humans make first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, the experience may have this much in common with Sphere: It could quite possibly be confusing and unsatisfying. But if it’s anywhere near so cliched, why bother? That Sphere is based on a Michael Crichton novel is not, in itself,…
thursday february 12 Desdemona–A Play About a Handkerchief: This “deconstruction” of Shakespeare’s Othello by playwright Paula Vogel posits the Moor’s hapless wife as a “spoiled and self-centered” pill who “struts around like a sorority queen reveling in her tales of sexual conquest; ever mindful that the one man she hasn’t…
A cappella except for hand-clapping, Taj Mahal growls “John the Revelator” under the titles of Blues Brothers 2000. That was enough to make me glad I had gone. What I didn’t expect was how many other reasons followed. The Blues Brothers, 1980’s feature-length treatment of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s…
“After you’ve been dead, everything else is just . . . something to do,” said Dannion Brinkley. Brinkley said that in September on the phone from his hospital bed in Charleston, South Carolina. He was explaining his nonchalance about the brain surgery he would undergo two days later that had…
thursday february 5 The Old 97’s/The Gourds: Both of these Texas outfits crank out curious, likable hybrids of folk, country and rock. The 97’s, based in Dallas, are touring behind their Elektra release Too Far to Care. As for the Austin-based Gourds, any band that titles a song “I Ate…
thursday january 29 Phoenix Symphony: Though his songs remain widely popular with performers, composer Kurt Weill is one of the relatively unsung–in the other sense of the term–geniuses of 20th-century music. He was even dissed, posthumously, by his longtime collaborator Bertolt Brecht. Weill’s stinging, brilliant work is featured in this…
thursday january 22 Scotland the Brave: Ambrose Bierce defined “kilt” as “a costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen [sic] in America and Americans in Scotland.” His point will probably be amply proved at this presentation starting at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, January 22, at America West Arena, 201 East Jefferson, which will…
Would that Half-Baked were even as well-done as its title implies. This attempt at a contemporary pothead comedy makes you long for the lightness and subtle urbanity of Up in Smoke. It has, maybe, this much of a claim on authenticity–it really does play like something that was written wasted,…
