Tammie Coe, 35, makes the cake. We discovered her amazing, fondant-covered creations in the dessert case at La Grande Orange, and pretty soon they were everywhere. (And coming soon to her second location at Artisan Village near Seventh Street and Roosevelt.) Tammie Coe Cakes is a tasty Phoenix phenomenon that…
Jim Pederson is a consummate politician: He’s rich, well-connected, and not above pointing fingers at the opposition. He’s also quite dull — or, to be fair, at least unwilling to bite when he’s baited with stupid questions from newspaper reporters. All these skills will come in handy should the former…
While everyone in town is wetting their pants over the new Mesa Arts Center, the truly exciting news in local theater this week is taking place in a much less glamorous location. Wedged into the rehearsal space behind the main stage at the Herberger Theater Center, iTheatre Collaborative’s production of…
By day, Ron May is Audience Services Director for Actors Theatre — whatever that means. The rest of the time he’s a dramatic triple threat: actor (most recently as an angry young man in Stop Kiss), director (earlier this month, he helmed Nearly Naked Theatre’s Marvin’s Room) and artistic director…
It’s nearly as difficult to get an interview with one of the 500-plus New Orleans evacuees housed at Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum as it is to get timely rescue assistance from FEMA. A dozen phone calls to flacks from various agencies in search of an audience with someone — anyone –…
One can only guess at what the new theater season holds. And because speculating about theater, at least in Phoenix, is often more entertaining than actually looking at it, here’s a list of facts and likely figures about where we’re at and what’s to come. Number of producing theater companies…
I was baffled when Nearly Naked Theatre announced earlier this year that it planned to open its season with Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room. McPherson’s dramedy tells a story that, despite some gallows humor and a better-than-competent script, isn’t more challenging than your average Lifetime Movie of the Week. The play’s…
You don’t need to mow down a Wal-Mart employee or kidnap a teenager and force her into prostitution to make headlines in Phoenix. Just ask Jose Avila, a Valley wiseacre who’s made news (not to mention the rounds of network talk shows) thanks to his super-thrifty approach to home furnishing…
Somehow, there’s nothing offensive about, say, Barry Manilow’s oeuvre being transformed into a big, shiny musical. In fact, it just plain made sense when one of Manilow’s nelly pop songs became a musical comedy called Barry Manilow’s Copacabana — starring The Phantom of the Opera’s Frank D’Ambrosio and The Love…
There are two things Amy Milliron wants you to know: First of all, she did not expose herself while breast-feeding her baby in public recently. And secondly, the media have completely invented the part about public outcry against public nursing. According to Milliron, a 29-year-old Tempe mother who’s lately become…
Fans are forever hassling Judy Rollings, director of the Herberger Theater Center’s Performance Outreach department as well as its Lunch Time Theater program, about when in the world she plans to return to the stage. She’s finally caved, with a one-woman show, Starring Judy From Chicago, that’s a witty recitation…
It will take the average reader about three minutes to read this newspaper column in which I, a person who is paid to share my opinion, will reveal the ways in which Black, White and Read All Over is a play totally lacking in substance and utterly devoid of entertainment…
Freethinkers and activists across the Valley have been wringing their hands ever since the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona announced earlier this month that its executive director, Eleanor Eisenberg, will retire. Eisenberg, who is 65 and has been with the local ACLU chapter for eight years, left her post…
Attention, shoppers: You can forget about parking in the shade, at least when you’re headed for Metrocenter. Despite Karen Bauernschmidt’s best efforts, the west-side mall recently axed more than 300 trees (most of them eucalyptus) growing in its expansive parking lot, a move that Bauernschmidt, a radical environmentalist, tried to…
Plenty of things piss me off. Bad grammar. Ugly architecture. Friends who let their dog hump my leg. Weather. People. But the item at the very top of the list of Things That Make Me Want to Kill Myself With an Ax is a simple phrase, one that everyone in…
Before I tell you why and how very much I hated Theater League’s The Wonder Bread Years, allow me to explain that this is a show I was born to love. I am the audience for this nostalgic gander at life as a boomer-era kid, one of those poor saps…
It’s silly, and a little bit sad, the way that Phoenicians crowd around to watch a summer rainstorm. Packed onto front porches, posted at windows, pulled to the side of the road, we ogle rainy weather as if it were an eighth wonder, a heretofore unseen miracle that may never…
Late last month, U.S. Immigration Judge John W. Richardson was expected to announce deportation dates for the Wilson Four, the former Wilson Charter High School clique detained in upstate New York while on a 2002 field trip with other classmates. Smarty-pants students Oscar Corona, Jaime Damian, Yuliana Huicochea and Luis…
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is exactly the kind of entertainment I deplore: a corporate-inspired translation of a cutie-pie musical cartoon adapted from classic literature. It’s peopled by actors dressed in character costumes that all but swallow their performances, which are anyway built on attempts to ape the motion picture…
Good news, girls. Apparently, mankind has at long last passed through that era where guys only wanted to get laid and have someone cook for them. Young men today, according to a cover story in this month’s Marie Claire magazine, want to get married and have babies, and they’re even…
Kelli James, Broadway’s first-ever Eponine in the original production of Les Misérables, is here among us. Tired of living out of a suitcase, and after a distinguished career that includes dozens of Broadway starring roles, James has settled in Phoenix, where she’s featured this month as a singing teapot in…
Murderball is a gem of a little film, one that’s at very least worth renting in its inevitable DVD release. It’s also one of the most over-hyped indies of the season. It won a couple of awards at Sundance — the Audience Choice prize and another for editing — and…
