You are seated, for the sixth consecutive year, in an imaginary auditorium, where the sound of rustling programs and impatiently shuffling feet suggest that the doling out of the Robbie Awards is about to commence. A hush falls over the pretend crowd, made up entirely of people who sell insurance…
Phoenix Theatre’s annual New Works Festival has become one of the few pleasant and edifying experiences in a stifling, largely theater-free summer. This year, the festival — founded by playwright Richard Warren and director Mark DeMichele — kicks off with staged readings of Black River (Friday, July 10, through Sunday,…
Some say the peacocks have always lived in Coronado, one of Phoenix’s oldest neighborhoods. Maria Cody has lived there for seven years and says the birds have been roaming Coronado’s streets since before she did. She proudly shows off a photo of one of the male peacocks, which one night…
You think you’ve got the whole biotechnology thing squared away, then David Ewing Duncan goes and publishes another book. The latest from Duncan, an American journalist whose beat is the environment and the development of green technologies, is Experimental Man: What One Man’s Body Reveals About His Future, Your Health,…
You think you’ve got the whole biotechnology thing squared away, then David Ewing Duncan goes and publishes another book. The latest from Duncan, an American journalist whose beat is the environment and the development of green technologies, is Experimental Man: What One Man’s Body Reveals About His Future, Your Health,…
Broadway Palm Dinner Theater’s production of High School Musical was nice enough. My impression of the show was certainly helped by the fact that I, unlike most people my age, don’t have kids between the ages of four months and 14 years, so I’m not sick to death of “Get’cha Head…
She’s ill-tempered and bossy and has green skin. She rides a broom and screams a lot and, if you piss her off, she’ll sic one of her flying monkeys on you. The Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t always a spiteful hag. When she was young, people liked her and…
Helene Klodawsky knows what makes us tick. She knows we’re nostalgic and love pop culture, and she’s onto us when it comes to a love of New American architecture. And shopping. Proof of Klodawsky’s omniscience can be found in the director’s Malls R Us, a new documentary that rips the…
I get strange things in the mail. This is probably because publicists are notoriously lazy and often insane, which might be why one of them recently sent me a DVD box set of the first season of Family Affair, a situation comedy that aired on NBC in the 1960s. The…
Charles Bowden knows something. In his new book, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing, Bowden reminds us that the world’s fuel reserves are trickling away and that terrorism is flourishing, and that global warming is real and species are dying out all around us. He points out that we…
You know those scenes in TV movies where the bad guy hires a hitman who turns out to be a cop? They’re real. Just ask Jack Ballentine, author and former Phoenix police officer, who became one of the most successful undercover operatives in the history of our or any other…
In the wake of the recent crash of Air France Flight 447, there’s an unfortunate resonance to author Dan Driskill’s upcoming presentation about the 1956 collision of two passenger planes in Northern Arizona. The event has become known among air crash aficionados (yes, they exist) as the Grand Canyon Air…
It seems Nearly Naked Theatre has been doing “naughty” plays for so long now that the company can appear subversive only by presenting a traditional musical. But the 10-year-old troupe isn’t pulling a stunt with its production of Blood Brothers, Willy Russell’s celebrated smash hit about twins separated at birth…
You know those scenes in TV movies where the bad guy hires a hitman who turns out to be a cop? They’re real. Just ask Jack Ballentine, author and former Phoenix police officer, who became one of the most successful undercover operatives in the history of our or any other…
I can imagine living at the foot of a mountain. Except in my fantasy, it’s a lush green mountain, not one of the dull, tan piles of rock of the Sonoran Desert. My mountain would be a sloped, slate-gray, moss-covered monolith spilling colossal shade trees onto the landscape below. No…
It’s with some regret that I recall the people in whose company I learned to drink. Not because they were sodden miscreants, but because our youthful friendships, born during suburban Phoenix summers spent sipping cheap beer and two-dollar wine, didn’t survive into our more sober middle age. I find myself…
You know those scenes in TV movies where the bad guy hires a hitman who turns out to be a cop? They’re real. Just ask Jack Ballentine, author and former Phoenix police officer, who became one of the most successful undercover operatives in the history of our or any other…
You know her as the woman who camped on the doorstep of George W. Bush’s Crawford Ranch in the summer of 2005. Cindy Sheehan’s month-long peace action, held after her son, Casey, was killed in Iraq, drew daily CNN coverage. Dubbed “Camp Casey” by the media, Sheehan’s makeshift camp stood…
You know those scenes in TV movies where the bad guy hires a hitman who turns out to be a cop? They’re real. Just ask Jack Ballentine, author and former Phoenix police officer, who became one of the most successful undercover operatives in the history of our or any other…
If Nearly Naked Theatre’s production of Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers were a competition instead of a superbly produced musical, then Johanna Carlisle’s performance as a working-class gal who gives her baby away would be the clear winner. And then a whole lot of other people would be tied for second…
I’ve been working on a list of people or things that Katie McFadzen possibly can’t play. Here’s what I have so far: a pencil sharpener; Stalin; a venereal disease. But don’t quote me on any of these, because it’s likely that next month she’ll show up on a local stage…
Brent Jeffs knew his destiny from an early age. The son of a prominent family in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jeffs expected to have multiple wives and significant power in the 10,000-member polygamous FLDS community. But as he grew older, Brent, nephew of Warren Jeffs,…
