Don’t be confused. It’s not staged in Moscow, but in Phoenix. And it’s not taking place at the Dodge Theatre, because that venue has been renamed the Comerica Theatre (ack! Why?). Still, it’s the Moscow Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker, one of a half-dozen Nutcrackers now in town, determined to…
Last winter, I attended a holiday dance show — one of those Christmas-themed musical pageants where the stage is overtaken by crowds from one dance class after another, mostly prepubescents determined to slog through “Jingle Bell Rock” without forgetting a ball-change or bursting into tears. I really enjoyed this production,…
I long to take the month of December off from writing, so that I can focus on tree-trimming and card-making and other seasonal events. December deadlines are usually a nightmare, largely because printers keep such odd holiday schedules, and writing January copy the week before Christmas usually means I’m missing…
John Waters is a gentleman, and so it’s unlikely that he will throw a Christmas tree at anyone who fails to gift him with a pair of cha-cha heels when he comes to Scottsdale. But the legendary filmmaker (Pink Flamingos, Hairspray) is certain to at least mention that infamous scene…
Time was when Grandma could be counted on to have iron-grey hair, always wrenched into a bun, and would only ever be found either tatting lace in a bentwood rocker or pulling something delicious from the oven. These days, Grandma is more likely to look like Valerie Bertinelli or (horrors!)…
D. Scott Withers made me forget Divine. That’s not easy to do, and not just because I think rather often of the late cross-dressing actor who first played Edna Turnblad in John Waters’ Hairspray. Withers’ performance as Edna in Phoenix Theatre’s Hairspray: The Musical was an entirely new creation, one…
It may have lesbians, dance breaks and Johanna Carlisle, but what’s really got people talking about Stray Cat Theatre’s production of Learn to Be Latina is its disclaimer. No one under 17, it seems, will be allowed to see Enrique Urueta’s show biz send-up unless accompanied by an adult. What,…
Saskia Jordá has no sense of direction. “I am directionally challenged,” the Venezuelan artist admits. “If you let me loose somewhere, I don’t know the difference between north and south. I walk into a store at the mall, and then I come out and go back the same way I…
What makes an artist tick? What makes him glue old bottle caps to a photograph of his dead grandmother and then piss all over it?Ask Gregory Sale, who — while he doesn’t necessarily do any of these things — is not only an artist, but the latest artist to be…
It’s funny, the things you remember. In 1979, I was the photographer for my high school newspaper. Our new journalism advisor, a mean-spirited psychopath named Barbara, wanted a story about the holiday displays in downtown Phoenix. Babs had just moved here from Florida and assumed that Phoenix did what most…
The past was when quilting was a stay-at-home thing, the purview of grannies who made blankets and groups of backwoods gals who wanted an excuse to get together and bitch. Today, quilting is an art form. Look no further for proof than Chandler, where Vision Gallery and Chandler Center for…
The past was when quilting was a stay-at-home thing, the purview of grannies who made blankets and groups of backwoods gals who wanted an excuse to get together and bitch. Today, quilting is an art form. Look no further for proof than Chandler, where Vision Gallery and Chandler Center for…
“You don’t sing to feel better,” actress Jevetta Steele says at one point in her electrifying lead performance in Arizona Theater Company’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. “You sing because it’s a way of understanding life.” August Wilson understands life. There’s rich, musical proof in the hopeful, often anguished portraits he…
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s The Muckle Man tells the story of a marine biologist who’s searching for giant squid, and who drags his wife and kids along with him on the hunt. Mom and kids aren’t happy about this — or about much of anything else, it seems. But on the latest…
Editor’s note: This is the third piece in an occasional series about Van Buren Street. I have been to the bughouse. It’s not nice to call it that, of course. It’s confusing, too. Each time I mentioned to friends that I was visiting the bughouse, they assumed I was planning…
It’s Spanish for “joy,” but Alegría – one of Cirque du Soleil’s earlier shows, now in revival – is in fact a darker version of the intergalactic circuses the troupe has since been known for. The show is less jubilant than it is joyfully oppressive, with dark lighting and darker,…
Scoff if you will, but why wouldn’t there be intelligent life on other planets? And, if there is, why wouldn’t they drop in on us here in the desert — specifically at beautiful Estrella Mountain Regional Park? X-Files fans and their pals are off in search of Little Greys on…
Ma Rainey was a real person. One of our earliest professional blues singers, she performed and recorded throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and her popularity and folksy style earned her the title “Mother of the Blues.” Among her more noteworthy compositions are “Bo-Weevil Blues,” “Black Bottom,” and “See See Rider…
It turns out that one can, in fact, have too much of a good thing. Witness Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), Actors Theatre’s season opener at the Herberger. This gorgeous, neatly acted production is flawed not in its execution, but in its over-long script, which…
It can’t be true. A festival devoted solely to celebrating Arizona’s locally owned businesses? A beer and wine garden offering samples of imbibe-ables made at breweries and vineyards located right here? Free food from local restaurants? Nah. It can’t be. And yet, it is, for the sixth consecutive year, Local…
There’s a reason why people who live in Phoenix sometimes fib and claim to live in Scottsdale. Named in 1894 for Army chaplain Winfield Scott, this smallish city is big on style. It’s no wonder that folks take long, loving detours through Scottsdale — there’s plenty to ogle. We say,…
I left the Catholic Church when I was 17. I’d been fussing for a while with all the weirdness about virgin birth and resurrection and the bilocation of St. Anthony of Padua, when one Sunday, on the way home from Mass, I casually referred to transubstantiation as a metaphor. My…
