I have finally seen a play that made me want to stand and applaud at the end. First time ever. I figure I’ve been to the theater on the average of once a week for 20 years, so that’s something like a thousand-plus plays and musicals I’ve seen. (I’m certainly…
It sounds sublime: A C-list television actor receives an e-mail from a con artist who’s posing as the wife of a dead Nigerian leader in need of cash. The actor — Dean Cameron, star of the Ski School movies and Mark Harmon’s co-star in 1987’s Summer School — writes back,…
On a recent December Sunday, on a still street nestled against Camelback Mountain, a party is in full swing at the L. Ron Hubbard House. It’s meant to be a holiday open house, to show off the stunning renovation of the simple brick dwelling where Hubbard founded Scientology a half-century…
Just when you thought there was no possible new approach to life, some guy — an architect like Bernard Khoury, for example — creates a concept about healing through architecture. Khoury, a Modernist who’s come to be known as the bad boy of building design, believes that creating a beautiful…
I’ve been working overtime lately to not hate the newish, ultra-modern condominium complex that was dropped into my historic neighborhood near Seventh Avenue and McDowell Road a few years ago. For a fan of early-20th-century architecture, it’s hard not to be bugged by a towering clump of boxy, corrugated concrete…
A boy is locked in a closet. We never learn his name, but as we watch John Caswell Jr.’s Closet.Drama: A Homo/Hetero Collision unfold, we learn a little about him: He is struggling with his sexuality. He’s acquainted with the Reverend Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, and…
What do Halloween, sweaters, and studying abroad have in common? They are, according to author and social commentator Christian Lander, “stuff white people like.” Lander’s blog of the same name (stuffwhitepeoplelike.com) launched a mini-revolution on the Internet by satirizing the interests of “left-leaning, city-dwelling white folk” who like ugly-sweater parties,…
They labored in isolation in Prescott, yet the work that Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer created in the middle of the 20th century has gone on to international acclaim. The three self-taught photographers, toiling together in solitude, began the transformation of classic mid-century photography from flat journalism into…
A House with No Walls is neither an enlightening history lesson nor a compelling entertainment. Thomas Gibbons’ play tells us nothing we didn’t already know about America’s unfortunate history of slavery, and its iTheatre Collaborative production, which commenced last weekend, provides little more than a handful of interesting performances. Flashbacks…
Should African-Americans cling to the legacy of slavery as part of their identity or should they distance themselves from this shameful, victim-identified chapter of their history? Thomas Gibbons’ A House with No Walls, in a production by iTheatre Collaborative, explores this conflict by juxtaposing a fictionalized, present-day story with the…
Neither artist Angel De Cora nor her art have anything to do with motor homes. The “Winnebago” in the title of Linda M. Waggoner’s book Fire Light: The Life of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist refers to the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska where De Cora was born in 1871. De…
When my friend Michele and I were teenagers, her mother had a totally cool boyfriend. Steve was ripped from the pages of Hip Swinger magazine: Bell bottoms, puka shells, Nik-Nik shirts. He had shiny, black, feathered hair, impossibly white teeth, and — long before it was faddish — a home…
Neither artist Angel De Cora nor her art have anything to do with motor homes. The “Winnebago” in the title of Linda M. Waggoner’s book Fire Light: The Life of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist refers to the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska where De Cora was born in 1871. De…
Neither artist Angel De Cora nor her art have anything to do with motor homes. The “Winnebago” in the title of Linda M. Waggoner’s book Fire Light: The Life of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist refers to the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska where De Cora was born in 1871. De…
Before his death last month, Dale Wasserman was among a handful of Americans to whom the title “Broadway legend” applied — although it seems likely that the famous (and famously grumpy) playwright would have disdained that title. Yet it was true. Wasserman wrote more than a dozen plays and musicals,…
I fall in love with old buildings. There’s that odd little Flintstonian office building at Third Street and Clarendon, whose comically prehistoric rock-and-mortar façade stole my heart years ago. For a while, I had as my screensaver a photograph of the impossibly tiny stone cottage I drive past when I’m…
He refers to himself as “the most fortunate person in the whole world.” To the rest of us, he is Holocaust survivor Leon Leyson, born Leib Lejzon. After two years in World War II concentration camps and several more in a displaced-persons camp near Frankfurt, Germany, Leyson went to work…
As usual, I saw a hell of a lot of plays this past year. But I suspect 2008 is the year I’ll remember not so much for what took place on stage (although it’s hard to forget a production as flawless as Childsplay’s A Tale of Two Cities, or one…
It’s finally happened: At the cost of a measly billion bucks and change, Phoenix has grown-up, state-of-the-art public transportation — the kind with public art at its stops and those funny little seats that disappear when you’re not sitting on them. We’ve got light rail, and no one, least of…
About a hundred years ago, when I was just out of short pants, I worked for a company called Associated Distributors. It’s a Phoenix-based business, owned by Leonard and Angela Singer, that distributes recorded music; when I went to work for Associated in 1980, that music came in vinyl, cassette,…
Christmas is two days away, and you’ve yet to track down that special thingamabob for your arty friend — the one with the paintings and sculptures all over his house, the one who definitely won’t want to find a DVD box set or the new Josh Groban CD under his…
It’s about time someone made something of the fact that many of the best-known Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers, and no one who knows anything about his career is surprised that it was Jake Ehrenreich who finally did it. A Jew Grows in Brooklyn, the actor’s almost-one-man show…
