Opera is occasionally good for some yuks, and Arizona Opera is out to prove that to the people who might otherwise just be shopping for the latest best-selling trade paperback. For this performance, audiences can skip the box office, the theatre seating, and the stuffy crowd. In the latest of…
Hands down, the worst restaurant meal I’ve ever been served was at El Tovar, the resort at the Grand Canyon. I was disappointed, because the El Tovar is, of course, a Fred Harvey resort. Or at least it used to be, before the Harvey company sold it and the rest…
It’s not enough just to own an old house. These days, we must celebrate it. For desert dwellers whose homes were built in the middle of the last century, that celebration comes in the form of the Modern Phoenix Home Tour + Expo hosted by Modern Phoenix, a clearinghouse and…
I hesitate to describe the staging tricks that make Arizona Theatre Company’s production of The Glass Menagerie so magnificent, for fear that detailing the ways in which director Juliette Carrillo has illuminated this graceful old warhorse will diminish its beauty for you when you go to see it. And you…
Just in time for Easter, everybody’s favorite rock opera about the political and personal struggles of Judas Iscariot is back in town. Jesus Christ Superstar is based on the gospel of St. John, and focuses primarily on the last week of Jesus’ life. And while we all know how that…
Any show featuring new work by Bob Adams is cause for celebration. And “See/Perceive,” in which the longtime local artist offers a series of “feathered paintings,” is an especially giddy party. Adams’ new works are made up of bits of delicate, brightly colored feather boas, arranged in lively stripes whose…
Any show featuring new work by Bob Adams is cause for celebration. And “See/Perceive,” in which the longtime local artist offers a series of “feathered paintings,” is an especially giddy party. Adams’ new works are made up of bits of delicate, brightly colored feather boas, arranged in lively stripes whose…
It sounds like the title of a Nancy Drew potboiler, but the mystery of Paradise Gardens is really just another story about some cool old houses and how they survived a half-century in a teardown town. The mystery is whether or not these houses, built in the mid-’60s and long…
Word on the street about Arizona Theatre Company’s new production of The Glass Menagerie is that it is not your grandparents’ Tennessee Williams. Apparently, director Juliette Carrillo has deconstructed this famous memory play, inserting some of the author’s stage directions into actors’ dialogues and dressing the set with period-correct furnishings…
Julius Shulman created stunning visual records of the work of pretty much every modern architect of the last century — from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry to John Lautner. His moody photographs captured the beauty of California’s modernist movement, and introduced America to a new way of seeing gorgeous…
It seems likely that Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, the Baroness Dudevant, would have been delighted that Frederic Chopin, with whom she had a ten-year-long affair, has set her life to music. But the Baroness, better known today as the French novelist George Sand, has been dead for more than a…
Editor’s note: This is the second piece in an occasional series about Van Buren Street. Read the first installment here. They’re mostly scary crap-holes now, but the motels on Van Buren Street were once destination spots for weary travelers. These weirded-out welcome wagons started out as a handful of cabins…
It’s a pity there aren’t more play scripts like Taylor Doherty’s Indivisible. If there were, one might have the opportunity to watch Steven J. Scally perform in a fine drama more often. Scally, perhaps the single most underrated actor in town, is captivating in Doherty’s excellent and vaguely futuristic commentary…
It’s likely, if you haven’t heard of Gilberto Gil, that you’re either not Brazilian or have been hiding under a pop-music rock for far too long. Gil is one of Brazil’s best-known singer/songwriters; he’s performed his signature blend of rock, samba, and reggae around the world and earned stacks of…
Written in part as he lay dying, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s majestic Requiem is considered the composer’s greatest unfinished legacy. Completed by Austrian composer Franz Xaver Süssmayr and several of Mozart’s students, it’s an orchestral piece for chorus and vocal soloists commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg, in memory of his…
You awaken one day to find yourself alone in a strange room with four beds. One by one, three other people join you, although you don’t recognize them and nobody else knows why they’re there either. Who are you? A group of amnesiac private-school students? The new cast of the…
Theater queens are no doubt rejoicing that [title of show] is playing now at the Herberger. Others, though they may see and enjoy Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell’s charming homage to musical theater, might — even as they’re laughing and tapping their feet — be puzzled by the endless references…
Sure, Jesus wept. But La Llorona, the crying woman of Mexican folklore, was doomed to weep for all eternity. Top that. The legend goes that Miss Thing’s lot in life came as a result of having drowned her own children after one of her boyfriends dumped her. (Who wouldn’t cry?)…
A door slams. A man in a black unitard angrily stalks onto a bare stage, carrying a bar stool. He sets the stool down, then spends the next several minutes moving the stool from place to place and doing the sort of limbering and breathing exercises an actor might do…
In 1966, proto-performance artist, Kendrick Washington, stood before an audience in Los Angeles’s Coronet Theater and held up a large mirror, aimed at the crowd. For an hour. Washington’s “performance” ended when an audience member (one of the few who remained) threw a shoe that busted the actor’s mirror. The…
Ugly Trellis House is finally gone. This large, ramshackle 1920s bungalow, kitty-corner to my own, has been glowering at me ever since I moved into the neighborhood seven years ago. I could see its beauty, but I had to look hard, past the cheap, ugly trellising that someone had long…
All I’d ever wanted to do was work in a record store. I’d begun collecting LPs in earnest during my freshman year in high school. I joined the Columbia Record Club (under the name ZaSu Pitts) and, by senior year, my collection was overtaking my tiny bedroom. My classmates had…
