“Okay, so, the guy was like a total loser.” “No way!” “Way. His Facebook photo is like 20 years old, and he hasn’t worked since March.” “I thought this was the one!” “Yeah, me too. Not! I’m going to die old and alone.” This was the conversation that took place…
Let’s say you’re a gay teenager, and you’re growing up in the barrio in Hollywood. You can count on being picked on for being queer, and maybe you’ll develop a fondness for original cast recordings and reruns of Bewitched. Chances are, you’ll have a small-minded, ethnocentric uncle who wants to…
I like to think that Johnny Cash, the country music singer-songwriter and American institution, mellowed with age. I suspect that late in life, he’d left far behind him the hard-edged life of a bitter former yokel who cheated on his wife and became addicted to “every drug there was to…
Hang on to your wimples. The Seduction of Almighty God is here, and it’s sure to have conservative religious types twisting in their pews for weeks to come. Set in the 1600s, during the disbanding of the English monasteries, Howard Barker’s cynical story of this grave era in English history…
Someone threw a dead fish at me at Madison Square Garden. It hit me square on top of the head, and my scalp smelled like mackerel for the rest of the night. This didn’t happen at the Madison Square Garden that’s currently at 118 North Seventh Avenue, which is actually…
Photography, like any other art form, has its own language. It’s a language that in recent years has been codified and restructured and recast through digitization. But even this radical reinvention pales in comparison to the one that photographer Harry Callahan and two of his artist pals launched a half-century…
Okay, seriously: I’m too old and too uncool and, frankly, too white to have enjoyed Black Theatre Troupe’s Revenge of a King. Herb Newsome’s freaked-out retelling of Hamlet was, in a word, annoying. Yo. The only thing I dislike more than Shakespeare is contemporized Shakespeare, and the only thing I…
Only diehard Sarah Wayne Callies fans recall her as Kate O’Malley on TV’s quick-to-vanish Queens Supreme, or her starring role as Detective Jane Porter on The WB’s update of Tarzan. Pretty much everyone who’s heard of the comely brunette knows her from her stint on FOX’s Prison Break and the…
The dying queen of Athens is back, but chances are we won’t immediately recognize her in Nearly Naked Theatre’s workshop production of Phaedre — at least, not if the company’s past adaptations of classical mythology are any indication. Artistic Director Damon Dering, whose deeply inventive retellings of ancient tales always…
To heck with Home and Garden Television — at least for today. The Phoenix Contemporary Design Fair will preempt HGTV in the hearts and minds of the design-savvy public by uniting them with the contemporary design community. The local folks who bring us the best in furniture and home design…
I’m always whining about how city planners here appear not to have any real success at continued development; that we’re a community continually launching long-term development plans that peter out before they’re realized. So you’d think I’d be happy about SkySong (1475 North Scottsdale Road), that monstrous, ASU-affiliated international business…
In act one, scene one of Jane Martin’s play Somebody/Nobody, an actress enters in an evening dress covered in blood. The story is set, perhaps needless to say, in Hollywood. Martin has drawn a cast of industry types who are either working in B movies or would like to be…
The economy sucks. Your house is worth half what it was when you bought it. Your 401k has been bludgeoned to within an inch of its life. You need more laughs. Toward that end, Herberger Theater Center is hosting the Phoenix Improv Festival, a three-day event packed with shows, workshops,…
It seems, somehow, a little late in the game for another film about the religious condemnation of homosexuality. But while Daniel Karslake’s documentary For the Bible Tells Me So makes the usual points — about whether God censures gay relationships; whether the Bible actually even addresses the subject; whether gays…
When I got home from the theater the other night, I immediately updated my Facebook page. I typed a note to the virtual community that read, “Two things: 1. Go see columbinus at Stray Cat Theatre; 2. Ron May is a genius.” This is a theater review, not a trendy…
Alison King is breaking all the rules – her own. King is co-founder of Modern Phoenix, a virtual community of like-minded city dwellers who call themselves MoPhos and whose great loves include our city’s mid-century architecture. Toward that end, King and her colleagues will host the annual Modern Phoenix Expo…
It’s a tough call: making entertainment from a story that draws on national tragedy and the death of many children. Yet with columbinus, playwrights Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli have managed to create an enlightening analysis of the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. They’ve…
I used to walk past row after row of these weird, pointy-roofed tract homes every day on my way to and from grade school. After I grew up and developed an interest in architecture, someone pointed out that those houses were designed by Ralph Haver. After which I noticed that…
Considering its high profile as both play and film, it wouldn’t be unfair to assume that everyone knows that Frost/Nixon is about the series of televised interviews between former President Richard Nixon and talk-show personality David Frost. Even people too young to recall the interviews, which aired in this country…
What do Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath have in common? They’re all famous dead literary figures. They all kept journals. And, at the moment, all three are being considered by the Arizona Women’s Theatre Company in its newest production, The Ophelia Project, presented in conjunction with the Phoenix…
They’ve done it to American history, the Bard, the Bible, and classic literature, and now the “bad boys of abridgement” in Reduced Shakespeare Company have distilled Tinseltown to its basest (and, one assumes, most amusing) elements. In Completely Hollywood (abridged), RSC’s Austin Tichenor and his henchmen skewer 175 of American…
Anything subtitled “Confessions of a Flight Attendant” blares a warning equivalent to “proceed to the nearest emergency exit.” But despite its awkward title, Around the World in a Bad Mood has been collecting admirable notices across the country. Written and performed by real-life flight attendant Rene Foss, the comic one-woman…
