We’ve seen them listed in playbills, and maybe we’ve even been seated near one in a restaurant or on a bus. But who knows what stage managers actually do, anyway? Glenn Bruner does. As stage manager for Arizona Theatre Company, Bruner is the lifeline to the actors, the props people,…
Tom Zoellner — journalist, former Phoenician, recently heartbroken guy — has written a book about the diamond industry. The Heartless Stone digs deep into the cold, hard heart of the diamond business, which Zoellner globetrotted to uncover. From the mines of Africa to the further reaches of the Arctic Circle,…
Woodsman: Is What It Is Theatre all but vanished last year, but resurfaces this month with an original adaptation (and world première) of the 2004 film that starred Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. The story follows Walter, who’s just been released from a 12-year prison sentence for committing a horrible…
It was a book and a play before it was a film, but, as ever, folks will still want Trainspotting, the play, to mirror the movie. It doesn’t. Here’s how. Character: Spud, the beloved spaz Fate in book and movie: Goofy speed fanatic who hates working. Fate in play: Nonexistence…
The heck with rehab. Anyone wanting to kick narcotics addiction should just go see Stray Cat Theatre’s gloriously ugly production of Harry Gibson’s Trainspotting. Crammed to capacity with pitch-perfect performances and almost unbearably realistic scenes of degradation, this stroll through addiction’s dark night is enough to scare anyone off junk…
The Bird’s been wondering what’s up with the rather noisy bitch fight between the queen of the philodendrons and the City of Phoenix. Word on the street is that Tera Vessel is planning to unload her hugely popular nursery, Tera’s Garden, situated in the old William Edward Cavness House at…
It may be a practice dating back to ancient Rome, when primitive drawings announcing “Mongo was here!” decorated the walls of caves, but The Bird says “Beware!” to local graffiti artists and taggers: Our cultural wasteland isn’t your canvas so much as a dragnet waiting to drop on your spray-paint-stained…
Sean O’Donnell waves at visitors from the window of his paint-peeling brick home; his fingertips splayed in greeting, his face mashed against the glass. “The first time I saw that, I forgot he was dead,” says artist Janet de Berge Lange, pointing to the color photocopy of O’Donnell that he…
Epic Proportions: This comedy by playwrights Larry Coen and David Crane came about after the pair noticed an extra in a biblical epic they were watching on television being crushed by a falling column. Coen and Crane (who’s best known as co-creator and executive producer of TV’s Friends) began to…
Despite what you may have heard, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is not a play about bestiality. The subject hovers over the story, but goat-fucking is more an allegory than a theme. Playwright Edward Albee is concerned here with the boundaries for “decent” human behavior; about how we decide…
Who says all politicians are corrupt, dimwitted hose-bags? Not this counterfeit canary, at least not since Governor Janet Napolitano’s veto of a bill that would have made illegal immigrants subject to the state’s criminal trespassing law. (In a letter to Republican Arizona House Speaker Jim Weiers, she’s vowed to veto…
Marshall Mason is back in town. After several years as drama professor at ASU (and theater critic at New Times!), Mason — who’s been nominated five times for Broadway’s “Best Director” Tony Award — returned to New York and his renowned career. This week, the reason for Mason’s visit becomes…
Epic Proportions: This comedy by playwrights Larry Coen and David Crane came about after the pair noticed an extra in a biblical epic they were watching on television being crushed by a falling column. Coen and Crane (who’s best known as co-creator and executive producer of TV’s Friends) began to…
My friend Neil e-mailed me the other day. “I can’t take another day of this,” he wrote. “If I hear about one more ‘Junior’ production being staged in Phoenix, I’m going to throw myself under the wheels of a bus.” Like me, Neil is a theater critic who’s troubled by…
Bob Adams, 45, hasn’t stopped making art. True, Adams — who made a name for himself more than a decade ago with thoughtful pen-and-ink drawings, paintings, and portrait silhouettes — hasn’t mounted a gallery show in a while. But he hasn’t given up on art, either; he’s lately been teaching…
I suppose I arrived at Phoenix Theatre last weekend with expectations too high. But considering the talented cast that director D. Scott Withers — no slouch himself — assembled for the company’s update of Clare Boothe Luce’s famously funny The Women, I couldn’t have guessed at the mess I’d find…
When Hillary Carlip refers to herself as a “multi-mediaist,” she’s not spinning dross. The award-winning author of Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out appears to be leading seven lives at once, all of them artful. Carlip is the creator of the acclaimed literary Web site Fresh Yarn: The Online Salon…
To The Bird’s great amusement, it found itself at a crowded hippie hangout in Tempe called 3 Roots Coffee the other day, watching one of the funniest comedies this proud pecker’s seen in years. Loose Change, an extremely independent film from three New York twentysomethings, wasn’t meant to be a…
The Bird observed all kinds of weirdness when it attended the massive march for immigration reform on Grand Avenue: white guys (from the news media) peeing in alleyways; illegal aliens (who’re normally treated like vermin by Americans) waving U.S. flags; Mayor Phil Gordon. But the strangest thing The Bird saw…
Their slogan “We make crack seem boring” may be only half true, but Male Pattern Radness certainly isn’t your average pop-rock duo. Billing themselves as an “acoustic fuck rock band,” former Applebee’s Grill & Bar waiters Ryan Lossing and Brandon Huigens have acquired a cult following in local clubs, where…
The Bird cruised over the pro-migrant march along Grand Avenue, half expecting to see KFYI-AM 550 squawk-jock Brian James’ head on the prong of a long, sharp rake at the front of the crowd. The demonstration, which drew at least 100,000 people, was coordinated as part of a nationwide “day…
Jesus Christ Superstar: Who in the world does He think He is? He’ll tell you — in song! — if you’ll get yourself down to Desert Stages Theatre. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famed musical is here again, resurrected just in time for Easter. And Passover! Lloyd Webber’s tuneful…
