Ah, alimony. Buster of dreams and bank accounts, you reside in law books and in the tiny, cold hearts of lawyers representing soon-to-be-ex-wives. Why, you’re even a character in a well-regarded stage play! Cheaper to Keep Her is Je’Caryous Johnson’s comic take on the financial woes of a busted-up marriage…
It appears finally to have happened: The Rolling Stones are too old to tour. Why else would the band have re-released its seminal concert film, Ladies and Gentlemen…The Rolling Stones, to cinemas nationwide? It’s possible, of course, that Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and bandmates Mick Taylor, Bill Wyman, and Charlie…
Pretty much everyone has heard of Cesar Chavez, and a lot of us are familiar with Tomas and the Library Lady, a play by Jose Cruz Gonzalez about Chicano author and poet Tomas Rivera. But few among us are familiar with El Teatro Campesino, a theater troupe founded in the…
I got into a lot of trouble in seventh grade for describing Phoenix, in a school newspaper article, as “pavement and cactus and Circle Ks.” But I stand by my long-ago description of our town, which — at least regarding its bleak topography — hasn’t changed a whole lot since…
Leonard Wood was here. He lived a nice long life, and he was well loved, and he chased away grief and fear by building things that occupied his hands and kept his mind off his troubles. He was an unremarkable man, one about whom none of us would ever have…
Rather than whine about the high temperatures, as we’ve spent the past three months doing, Lisa Sette got constructive about it. A new show called “From the Ground Up” has, for much of the summer, been distracting us from the monstrous weather with new works by well-regarded artists, each of…
Every eight years or so, I give Neil Simon another try. Usually I do this by trying to make it through one of the perfectly terrible film translations of his treacly and annoying stage plays by watching one on TV. (I always fail to get much past the middle of…
Somewhere, down deep inside each one of us, a Tubes song is playing. Possibly it’s “White Punks on Dope” or it might be “What Do You Want from Life.” Unfortunately, it is probably “She’s a Beauty.” The pre-punk, post-glitter rock of this bright band with its long, sparkly roots here…
Joan Waters is inspired by Phoenix, her home for more than 20 years. Originally from England, she studied African art at the University of Maryland, and lived in that state for many years. But it’s the klieg-like lighting and the vast openness of the desert that informed Waters’ early, abstract…
In a galaxy far, far away, a trio of Latex-clad space bimbos are busy fighting crime when they receive an alarming message: Someone is murdering songbirds at an intergalactic discothèque. Something must be done — and to the tune of a disco beat, if at all possible. So commences Saucy…
Early buzz on scenic designer Robert Kovach’s set for Noises Off, which launches Phoenix Theatre’s 90th season, is that the set is a real stunner. And it needs to be — because the set in Michael Frayn’s play-within-a-play is a principal character, just as important as the leading lady (in…
Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens was written, the story goes, for people who felt more at home in bars and discos than they did going to the theater. Its authors set the show in an intergalactic nightclub called Saucy Jack’s Cabaret Bar, and wrote the show’s audience into the…
Sunnyslope Mountain. Phoenix Financial Center. Phoenix Towers. The Bikini Lounge. If it’s in Phoenix and it’s a building and it’s even a little bit pretty, artist Jason Hill has captured it in brightly inked three-color screen prints. And, amazingly, he makes it look spectacular. Don’t believe us? Head straight for…
Among our summer rituals is re-watching all 32 episodes of Gidget, the 1965 television series starring Sally Field. This year, we will also watch The Desert of Forbidden Art, and not just because it features narration by Miss Field. The film, which is also voiced by Ben Kingsley and Ed…
Harold Pinter is sneaky. The playwright’s stories start out canted, and slowly slide from seemingly mundane settings and people — strangers at a party; former college classmates reminiscing in a living room — into stories that look familiar but feel (usually all at once) a little off. The strangers at…
You’ve lived in Phoenix for so long that you still jump when you see one of the long, silver light-rail cars coming toward you in traffic. You’ve had rainbow sunsets and prairie dogs and Ladmo, but you’ve never had real public transportation before — certainly not the kind that comes…
Poor Annie Bartlett. Her fiancé dumped her. Her dead mother is constantly criticizing her. And her lay-about father was beaten to death — possibly by his girlfriend. What’s a gal to do? If you’re the revived fictional character, Annie Bartlett, from author Irene Ziegler’s just-published Ashes to Water, you pull…
Who knew that Phoenix was home to so many restless dead people and alien visitations? It must be true; why else would we be hosting the first annual Paranormal Conference this month? The confab will, according to its rather spooky press materials, “bring the paranormal, UFO, and metaphysical worlds together…
It hardly seems fair to comment on Hale Centre Theatre’s hyper-cheerful Annie Get Your Gun. In a better world, a community theater production of the Irving Berlin perennial would be exempt from the considerations of any critic. But it’s summer in Phoenix, which means three months of warhorses performed by…
Sunnyslope Mountain. Phoenix Financial Center. Phoenix Towers. The Bikini Lounge. If it’s in Phoenix and it’s a building and it’s even a little bit pretty, artist Jason Hill has captured it in brightly inked three-color screen prints. And, amazingly, he makes it look spectacular. Don’t believe us? Head straight for…
For those of us who grew up on the horror stories of Aunt Maud and for whom the phrase “Feed the birds” induces tittering, it’s iconic. To everyone else, The Wallace and Ladmo Show is just another old kiddie program — Phoenix’s version of L.A.’s Hobo Kelly without the magic;…
I have an aunt and uncle back home who spend every summer “down cellar,” which in Ohio means that in June, when the temperatures soar into the 80s, they pretty much abandon their three-story house and retreat into their basement until late August, when their “hot” weather ceases. I envy them…
