At this writing, Bob Somerby is on the edge of his seat. He still isn’t sure whether he was college roommates with a historical footnote or with the next president of the United States. “Do I know Franklin Roosevelt?” Somerby wonders aloud, by phone from his home in Baltimore. “Or…
“The problem in Phoenix, the way I see it, anyway, is that there is a real separation of the Latinos and the Anglos.” Mad Coyote Joe isn’t talking about bilingual education versus English immersion, or South Phoenix versus North Phoenix. He’s talking about restaurant culture. “You go to Albuquerque, New…
It’s the day after Election Day, and I’m having lunch in the heart of Mesa with a Communist elected official. If that’s not surreal enough, neither of us yet knows for sure who the next president of the United States will be. Nor does CNN.Fabricio Rodriguez, student body vice president…
Sixty years to the month after it first opened, and after more than a year dark, Tempe’s Valley Art Theatre reopens this week. The venue, newly renovated by Harkins Theatres, reintroduces itself to the community with a series of celebratory events and schmoozes, after which, Dan Harkins promises, it will…
It’s a complicated — but worthwhile — weekend at the Tempe Improv. First of all, it’s truly improvisational: Sketch comedian Wayne Brady appears Thursday, November 9; Friday, November 10; and Sunday, November 12, at the Tempe Improv Comedy Theater.Brady has emerged as the most acclaimed of the performers on ABC’s…
Brian Curtice breaks a tortilla chip into three pieces and lays them out on his napkin to represent three dinosaur bones. He’s explaining to me how he turned three dinosaurs into one, and pissed off the paleontological community to boot.”At the time, there were supposed to be three supergiants from…
After kicking off with a cheerily conventional, highly entertaining Barber of Seville, Arizona Opera kicks its season into high gear with a superb, much less conventional staging of Carmen. Maybe because of its lurid tabloid plot, Bizet’s masterpiece, regarded as scandalous when it premièred just months before the composer’s death…
“You’ll be the first journalist in the Valley that I’ll walk right up to the spot where I was conceived,” Dan Harkins says over the phone. He’s inviting New Times to tour the Valley Art Theatre, which is in the final stages of renovation before its grand reopening later this…
“Double-belled euphoniums and big bassoons . . .”It’s a lyric from “76 Trombones” in The Music Man, and if you’ve heard of Leslie Van Zee’s favorite musical instrument, there’s a good chance that’s where you’ve heard of it. Van Zee uses only a single bell, not a double, but she…
The sky to the north flashed with white lightning as I pulled off the 101 onto McDowell and turned into the rutted driveway. It was after 10 on a school night, so parking was easy and the crowd was sparse. The perfect time to check out Arizona’s Original Scream Park.Scaring…
We’ve never seen anything like it — a strange hybrid of animal and vegetable. Beneath a shiny crimson crown are segmented layers of pinkish crustacean abdomen, and below that, a bright red base like a big single foot, oozing out semiliquid. We stare at the unnatural thing between us, so…
Poor hapless Renfield, wonderfully played by poor hapless Dwight Frye, climbs into the carriage that picks him up at the Borgo Pass. The ride is rough, so the real estate agent leans out of the window to complain to the driver. Then he freezes. Are his eyes deceiving him –…
Onscreen, the giant lips appear and begin to sing a catalogue of monster-movie references. In front of the screen, illuminated by hand-held lights from the audience, stands an incredibly thin, pale young woman — she looks like a more spectral Winona Ryder. She begins to sing along with the lips…
Upon hearing that I’m going to lunch with Lucianne Goldberg, one of my colleagues waggishly suggests, “You should have lunch with her over the phone and tape it.” Almost everyone else to whom I mention my date has to furrow his brow and be reminded of who Goldberg is –…
Twenty bars in, you couldn’t help but smirk. Or I couldn’t, anyway. The overture to Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), with which Arizona Opera kicked off its season last weekend, was executed with lightness and verve under the baton of Kirk Muspratt. The Tucson audience sat…
“This is as close as you’ll find to an Italian deli in New York out here.”Gesturing to glass cases gloriously piled full of dried sausages, Italian salads, Italian desserts, Italian everything, Patrick Lubrano says, “You can’t find stuff like this out here. I brought my mother-in-law in here, and she…
“We’re going to get silly, and at the same time find our way through this mire of romantic hell that we often find ourselves in,” promises Mark Anderson, describing his show “Crazy Love: A Laughing Look at Romance,” which plays this weekend at the Tempe Improv. Anderson himself has, he…
Not ready to give up on baseball yet? It’s understandable. Back East, the start of the season in the spring is a sweet harbinger of good weather. That effect is reproduced here by the approach of the Arizona Fall League. The 2000 season gets rolling on Tuesday, October 3. Regarded…
House sitters are always trouble. In the movies, this is a rule with few exceptions, and the house sitter in Cleopatra’s Second Husband isn’t among them. This elliptically nasty little psychological thriller from writer/director Jon Reiss features possibly the most odious house sitter in movie history, then serves him a…
We alerted you a while back to the Maricopa County Library District’s monthlong celebration of the centennial of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. And we told you the 1939 Judy Garland Wizard of Oz is to be screened at 1 p.m. Saturday, September 23, at Southeast Regional Library, 775 North…
There’s a trio of duets in Duets. The film is set in the world of karaoke singing, but the title really refers to three sets of paired-off actors, performing pas de deux to the tune of John Byrum’s Golden-Age-of-Television-ish dialogue. Only one of the three duos shakes fully to life,…
“Oz never did give nothin’ to the Tin Man/That he didn’t, didn’t already have . . .”It doesn’t seem accidental that these wise lines come from a band called America. A hundred years ago this month, a children’s book by a frustrated playwright and businessman named L. Frank Baum, a…
