It’s the bane of my existence, a hideous blight to which I’ve been witness countless times, a painful bore that causes me to shrink in my theater seat each time it waggles its ugly theatrical head. Audience participation gives me gas. It ruins any play, lovely or ugly, and destroys…
I confess: I didn’t want to see Never Been Thawed when it premièred here about a year ago. I went to the film’s screening as a favor to a friend, whose best friend’s daughter appears fleetingly in one scene, but I’m not a big fan of independent films — especially…
Chris Simcox is not a racist. And he’s not a vigilante. He’s just a nice guy from Tombstone who’s tired of all those nasty Mexicans sneaking over the border looking for better lives here in our sovereign nation. By forming The Minuteman Project, a patrol group bent on “sealing the…
Childsplay’s Romeo and Juliet is not just for kids. Thanks to crafty staging and a talented cast, all of them able to play persuasively any age or gender, it’s an edifying and even entertaining production of this oft-told love story. At a Sunday matinee populated mostly by underdressed tweens, I…
I hate Shakespeare. I always have. And you — if you’re unfortunate enough to have slogged through one of his interminable plays (or worse, a film adaptation of same) — probably hate him, too. That is, unless you’re a snooty dilettante who’s allowed himself to be convinced that every couplet…
Ed Dominguez, 38, painter, Phoenix booster, refugee from architecture and from San Juan, Puerto Rico, his birthplace. His large-format paintings of nuns have made brides of Christ hotter than ever, and his newest series is designed to do the same for our downtown skyscrapers. Jump high or stay home: San…
Note to young hipsters who want to claim famed underground filmmaker George Kuchar as their own: You’re 40 years too late. Although Kuchar is hotter than ever with disaffected young film fans, his oeuvre of oddball movies actually belongs to your parents — assuming your parents are the sort of…
Molly Sweeney is blind. And she’s married to a windbag, a dorky bore who’s convinced her to undergo surgery to restore her eyesight. She’s lived a full, happy life in her native Ireland — at least until her meddlesome husband takes her on as his latest cause. The operation restores…
I’ve been watching anime for the past couple of days, and there isn’t enough aspirin (or Chivas Regal) in the world to relieve my pain. For those fortunate enough not to know, anime is a term used to describe a type of highly stylized Japanese animation in which drawings of…
Whenever I find myself trapped in a theater with another lousy production of another dreary play or musical, I always turn to my friend the playbill. I’ve destroyed my eyesight peering into the dark at these marvels of bad syntax and questionable grammar, but it’s been worth it. Because playbills…
Perhaps in honor of the fourth anniversary of Cher’s farewell tour, MGM recently released a DVD edition of Chastity, the 1969 stink bomb featuring the singer’s first dramatic role. Shot entirely in Phoenix, this long-lost indie (for which Cher’s daughter is named) was written, produced, scored, and some claim directed…
John Nelson, 48, renowned outsider artist, creates primitive acrylic and collage-on-wood-panel works inspired by puns and word play that strike his fancy. Nelson’s new show, “VACANCY (at the Madson Hotel),” is a collaboration with writer Eric Susser about a metaphorical transient hotel where sad, sick people (representing you and me…
You shouldn’t know from Sunday morning AM radio — with maybe one exception. Too Jewish With Rabbi Sam Cohon and Friends, which debuted here last month, is fast becoming a guilty pleasure among Jews and gentiles alike. The 3-year-old Tucson-based program, which can be heard Sunday mornings at 7 on…
Tongues are still wagging about the night in 1990 when Phoenix Theatre’s curtain came up to reveal a giant naked man, his ass rouged and spotlighted in the first moments of the company’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The derrière belonged to actor Christopher Wynn, and one of the gasps…
The Last Five Years, which played briefly off-Broadway in 2002, chronicles a young couple’s romance using two different time lines. Her story starts at the end of their relationship, while his begins at the beginning, on the day they meet. The two stories collide briefly at the couple’s wedding, then…
Once upon a time, folks who kept their checkbooks balanced and hung up their clothes when they weren’t wearing them were considered well organized. Today, these people are Obsessive Compulsives, the scourge of the nation, strapped into recovery programs and ridiculed on Maury Povich because they occasionally polish their shoes…
Imagine for a moment that you’re at a diner, and you’ve just ordered one of those “man-size” breakfast combos, the kind that come with four eggs and three kinds of meat and griddle cakes and a side of hash browns and a little plate of toast. In the space of…
The Michael Jackson jury has been selected, and, not unlike Jackson himself, it’s two-thirds female and mostly white. And if this jury doesn’t help convict Jackson of the child-molestation charges brought against him in Santa Barbara County, California, he’d better watch his back — because Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, Ph.D., is…
You don’t fool me for a minute. You’re admiring that Jeff Falk painting, maybe even whispering to your companion about Jeff’s confident use of tempura and his canny allusions to Marc Chagall, but I know what you’re really thinking. You’re thinking about the turkey and Brie sandwich at My Florist…
If Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart isn’t often revived, it’s almost certainly because it’s an issue-related drama with a story — about the first few years of the AIDS epidemic in Manhattan — that sounds, in quick summary, quite dated. It doesn’t help that the play is equal parts lecture…
This is what it’s come to: I have driven for nearly an hour in order to interview a big plastic skeleton. What’s more, I’m doing it at a place I swore I’d never, ever visit: the Arizona Renaissance Festival, a faux medieval village (one of the largest of its kind…
Alas, the lowly AIDS play. Originally built in the face of a crisis, AIDS plays have lingered as a subgenre of theater, one that has withered as science and society have found ways to address the crisis. There are notable exceptions: Angels in America, of course; and Larry Kramer’s The…
