9/5-9/30 How low can LoDo go? Lower than you’d expect from a cutting-edge gallery: 100 smackers. To celebrate its new name and nonprofit status, downtown’s Studio LoDo/Phoenix Center for Contemporary Art greets the fall arts season with “The $100 Show.” Launching with a 7 p.m. reception on First Friday, September…
Thu 8/14 “I think that comedy should not occur only in smoky nightclubs,” says comedian and show organizer Victoria Lipman. “It should be everywhere.” The Comedy Sorority (one of several troupes Lipman organizes) is not only all female, but also all squeaky clean. Lipman has only two rules in her…
Performance art, punk rock, fire eaters, DJs, painted monkeys, singing bards, poetry, video and some dancers thrown in for good measure — these are a few of Paper Heart Gallery owner Scott Sanders’ favorite things, which is why he and artist/collaborator Jeff Falk decided to combine all of them into…
Tue 8/5 It’s an odd match-up at best, a pairing of two of the greatest control freaks in guitar history: B.B. King, who measures his solos with the precision of a diamond cutter, and Jeff Beck, who is as much a sound sculptor as he is a musician. King is…
With a star-studded roster including George Clinton, Los Tucanes de Tijuana, India.Arie, Kansas, Naughty by Nature, Billy Bob Thornton, and the Village People, it’s either a benefit concert or a Sweeps Week episode of The Simpsons. This weekend, it’s the former, as Off the Hook Productions sponsors a concert benefiting…
Sat 7/19 For those who need more spontaneity in their nightlife, the promoters of Inkblotch are throwing up a staggering slate of DJs and hip-hop talent for an all-night, all-ages bash to open a new club in Phoenix — but they’re not saying where. Inkblotch’s Mike Stanton says the secret…
7/4-7/26 This month, when First Friday coincides with Independence Day, eye lounge tempers blind patriotism with more personal interpretations of what America is all about. “Our American Life,” opening Friday, July 4, offers artistic perspectives from Linda Lewis and Rebecca Blume, two eye lounge members, as well as guest artist…
6/28-7/12 It’s one way to get a jump on the competition. The title character of FrogWoman, a new production by Theater in My Basement/SW Annex, “has her whole body changed in order to become famous,” explains director Ilana Lydia. “She has her skin dyed green and her legs extended and…
Sat 6/28 While the first wave of hot rodders set a standard for fast cars, teens and twenty-somethings these days are building sweet rides on their own terms. Classics and muscle cars are growing scarce (not to mention more expensive), so they’ve satisfied the need for speed with souped-up four-cylinder…
High style meets lowbrow in the neo-burlesque revival that is grabbing America by the pasties, offering people more tease with their strip. The movement began in the 1980s when Dixie Evans started Exotic World, a museum dedicated to old burlesque, in Helendale, California. Halfway between the glitz of Las Vegas…
John Melendez (a.k.a. Stuttering John) has been punched by some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Making an art form out of the stuttered guerrilla interview, Melendez has the balls of steel necessary to walk up to anyone and say just about anything, as his fourth-grade teacher noted on his…
6/12-6/26 “Line! Line! Oh my God!” So goes The Actor’s Nightmare by Christopher Durang, a play that stretches a single joke into a one-act about an accountant named George Spelvin who unwittingly finds himself in a play without any memory of having attended a single rehearsal. What follows is a…
Sat 6/7 Everyone who wears purple dies — at least in the Studio One production of The Curse of the Purple Tutu, choreographed by Studio One founder Melissa Cesarano. The curse afflicts all those who wear garments made of a purple fabric robbed from the grave of a woman long…
When Kathy Tweet decided to experiment with her Improbable Theatre Company, the audition notice read: “Calling all drama kings and queens.” She got seven kings and queens to be part of a collectively autobiographical narrative called Actual Lives: Candid Snapshots, which will be performed in the Herberger Theater Center’s Lunch…
5/9-6/1 In 1998, the musical Parade swept Broadway with its tragic tale of a man accused and murdered for a crime he didn’t commit. Based on the true story of Leo Frank, who was tried and lynched for the murder of one of his employees in 1917, the musical won…
Wed 5/7 Anyone who missed the wonderful documentary Buena Vista Social Club, about the fantastic musicians and music of Cuba, has a chance to more than make up for the karmic deficit by attending what promises to be a brilliant performance by the Afro-Cuban All Stars at 8 p.m. Wednesday,…
5/1-5/11 The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks, a powerful Japanese folktale turned children’s play, begins when a cruel lord captures a Mandarin duck because he covets his exquisite plumage. When a kitchen servant sees that the enforced captivity is destroying the bird’s beauty, she frees him, causing the evil lord…
4/25-4/27 One of the more interesting aspects of this particular planet’s people is the way we compartmentalize ourselves into identifiable groups. Nations are formed; flags are waved; and beliefs, customs and practices become identifiable over time as part of individual cultures. The word “culture” also can mean the enlightenment and…
If you’ve been watching the “All War, All the Time” networks, your vision of a warrior probably includes a Marine in combat fatigues going door to door with an AK-47. But this weekend’s ASU Pow Wow 2003, held in conjunction with American Indian Culture Week, will celebrate another kind of…
4/115/3 In 1998, a 21-year-old gay college student was beaten and left to die in the hills outside Laramie, Wyoming. The hate crime made headlines throughout the nation; the community, population 27,000, became synonymous with intolerance.In the year and a half following Matthew Shepard’s death, stage writer Moisés Kaufman and…
If you still think of improv comedy as amateur night, let the Phoenix Improv Festival change your mind. This second annual two-day event brings the best of Valley improv together with the best of the nation’s offerings to convert all of you unbelievers. The festival was founded by Jay Melius…
4/3-4/6 The macabre tale of Tosca – strewn with love, murder, jealousy and evil, exacting revenge from beyond the grave — has left audiences weeping for two centuries.Allan Glassman, the tenor playing Mario Cavaradossi in Arizona Opera’s production, has played the role many times but jumped at the chance to…
