What if you could do anything you wanted to with a local strip mall — the ugliest one, that nasty pile of brick and macadam that blights your vision as you pass it on your way to work every morning? That was the idea behind the “Flip a Strip” design…

There’s hope for Yule fans who are too cool for A Christmas Carol, The Nutcracker, and the other holiday-centric fare that fills every theatrical nook and cranny each December. It comes in the form of American Pastorela: The Road to the White House, a satirical take on the Nativity story…

We can add Blaine Drake’s glorious, curvilinear Scoville House to that long list of Beautiful Buildings That Have Been Obliterated from the Local Landscape. The house, the second mid-century Drake in the Biltmore neighborhood to be demolished in recent years, was significant for a number of reasons, not the least…

Find out why all those folks who live in old homes in downtown Phoenix are so dang house-proud at this weekend’s 24th annual F.Q. Story Historic Home Tour. The event takes place up and down Story’s Lynwood Street, where historic bungalows, Spanish Revival, Tudor, and Transitional Ranch homes will throw…

Call off the Christmas competition. The heck with mistletoe and holly. Kyle Jarrow’s impertinent, improbable A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant is coming to a theater stage near you. The folks at Stray Cat Theatre (who else?) corralled a cast of children to portray figures from the controversial Church…

If it’s December and Patti Hannon is wearing a habit and cracking wise about frankincense and little altar boys, you know you’re watching Sister’s Christmas Catechism: The Mystery of the Magi’s Gold. The third, holiday-infused installment in Mary Pat Donovan’s Late Nite Catechism series is back like a bad fruitcake…

Just before the curtain goes up on The Sunset Limited, Cormac McCarthy’s “Novel in Dramatic Form,” a man attempts to kill himself by leaping in front of a train. He’s saved by a stranger, and the pair hole up together to discuss, among other things, the first man’s attempted suicide,…

There’s nowhere quite like the Southwest, or Phoenix, so where better than the PHX and its namesake art gallery (PHiX) for a two-day festival of transcultural performances exploring the desert and our place in it? The name of the fest is ¡Teatro Caliente!, and the sixth annual installment features art…

Talk about nostalgia! Ubu Roi, which takes bows at Space 55 Theatre, was first produced in 1896. Championed by theater fans as the play that launched the absurdist tradition, Ubu Roi (King Ubu) was penned by French writer Alfred Jarry. The author likely considered his career finished when a riot…

Phoenix may be overrun with strip malls, but we didn’t invent them. In fact, Los Angeles is considered the real home of the mini-mall, a place designed for urban automobility, for grabbing a quick snack and doing some speedy shopping. L.A. architect John Kaliski, author of Everyday Urbanism, will discuss…

People have been whispering about actor Greg Lutz’s upcoming directorial debut. Seems Lutz has cast fellow actor Neil Cohen, who’s typically found emoting on stage in an evening gown (and occasionally a gingham dirndl), as a man in iTheatre Collaborative’s Eat the Taste. What’s more, word on the street has…

“I’m still amazed by all the vileness and stupidity I’ve witnessed in my life,” former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic once told the Cortland Review. It was this vileness and stupidity — and the philosophy that “true art must be greater than the person who created it” – that inspired…

I made an unfortunate assumption when I recently wrote about Flip a Strip, a design competition sponsored by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in which entrants were asked to give facelifts to one of three rundown strip malls in metropolitan Phoenix. I remember thinking then that the winner of…

Let’s get this straight: Maureen McCormick was never a regular on the daytime soap The Edge of Night. That was Leah Ayres, who played Marcia Brady in The Bradys, the six-episode ’90s drama that was the last in a long string of failed Brady Bunch spin-offs. And Maureen McCormick is…

This is perhaps the only article in the history of her career which will not mention by name the sitcom on which actress Eve Plumb became famous. That’s because Plumb’s current career as a painter has produced work that frankly deserves to be admired not because it comes from a…

This is perhaps the only article in the history of her career which will not mention by name the sitcom on which actress Eve Plumb became famous. That’s because Plumb’s current career as a painter has produced work that frankly deserves to be admired not because it comes from a…