October 31, 1977: Tonight was extremely strange. Janette and I went to the Sombrero Theater (which is way down on Seventh Street and Camelback, kind of a scary part of town) to see Phantom of the Paradise. Janette has seen Phantom 37 times! I’ve never known anyone who has seen…
Any second now, Phoenix is going to start looking a lot more like Tucson. That is, if County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox and Youth Program Supervisor Jessica Martin have anything to say about it. They’re the folks behind Las Artes de Maricopa County, a new youth-at-risk program that swaps GED…
She might have been a Midwestern orphan named Mildred Davenport. She may have been the great-granddaughter of the illegitimate son of the King of England. She even could have been a Native American, invited by President Franklin Roosevelt to act as America’s goodwill ambassador to Mexico. The only thing we…
Picture me, just this once, wearing a shiny turban anchored with a big paste jewel. I’m sitting before a tiny, round, velvet-covered table, gazing into a crystal ball. The ball is filled with all kinds of swirling pastel lights and a bunch of purple glitter that occasionally morphs into shapes…
Plenty of Olympic athletes trained in Phoenix for the summer games, and we even managed to send some locals to compete in Athens this month. But the Valley’s truest distinction at the Olympics is the presence of little Gabriela Cruz, one of only a handful of McDonald’s employees from across…
Those zany kids at Stray Cat Theatre have strapped a leash onto their new season, which they’re opening with something called Poona, the Fuckdog — a title as compelling as it is unprintable, at least in Phoenix. “The Rep has Poona, the (Expletive) Dog,” laughs Stray Cat’s artistic director Ron…
Grease is definitely the word, even if I don’t entirely understand why. I have nothing against fab ’50s musicals or playwrights Warren Casey and Jim Jacobs, who co-authored Grease back in the ’70s. Their score is among the best of its kind, because it mimics the sound and sentiment of…
Chauvinism is funny. Misogyny is a laugh riot. And Robert Dubac, author and star of The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron?, is pretty darn amusing, too. The show, which ran for months in Chicago, Cleveland and Boston, and has occupied the Herberger Stage West for most of the summer, recounts the…
You can tell that PALican is a star because he arrives with an entourage. I’d arranged to interview PALican himself, who I assumed was a guy in a bird suit, but the star of KAZ-TV’s unbelievably schlocky PALican and Friends (who turned out to be a girl in a bird…
I admit that I ended up more interested in the audience that came to see The Pirates of Penzance than I was in the show itself. That’s not because there’s nothing to like about this latest Hale Centre Theatre production, which contains some beautiful singing and several nice performances. But…
John Miranda is not a racist. The 68-year-old former Marine insists he posted a sign reading “For Sale to Whites Only” in front of his Waddell home because he wants to protect future owners of the property from racism. Miranda is leaving his Clearwater Farms neighborhood because he says the…
CHECK HER OUT Seattle may have the Space Needle, and Paris may have the Eiffel Tower, but Phoenix is home to 2004’s Librarian of the Year. Toni Garvey hasn’t let her title go to her head, despite the fact that she was chosen earlier this year from among all librarians…
Laughter, Markham Breen says, is the best medicine. Breen is a master of tittering, a ruler of guffaws. He’s a Scottsdale psychotherapist who believes in the healing power of laughter, and who’s lately touting a systematic method of giggling and sniggering that he swears is about to take psychiatry by…
As written, Late Night Catechism II isn’t much more than an excuse to charge us twice for the same shtick. It’s told in the same spirit as its predecessor, Late Night Catechism, which has been running for years at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. This sequel stars Patti Hannon…
Richard Warren abandoned a career in advertising and rewrote himself as a playwright. But when the cost of a staged reading of one of his plays proved prohibitive, Warren convinced Phoenix Theatre to present the piece as part of a new plays festival. Today, the monthlong Phoenix Theatre New Works…
He has been, for the past 10 years, the mayor of Tempe — a man who, like the best politicians, has been both respected and reviled. Neil Giuliano is a man who built a town lake, a man who helped revitalize a sagging downtown, a man who was reelected three…
The very best thing about Menopause: The Musical is that it eventually ends. Although not soon enough. After what seems like days, the off-key warbling and flatfooted dance numbers — and therefore the misery of any discerning audience member — finally stumble to a close. But not before we endure…
The reception area outside of Leah Landrum-Taylor’s office smells of burnt toast. Perhaps a file clerk in the House of Representatives has scorched an English muffin this morning — or maybe someone is trying to intimidate Representative Landrum-Taylor with a subtle warning. If so, they’re wasting their time, because Landrum-Taylor…
David Mamet’s love of the rhythms of American speech is the hallmark of his work. His people speak in a repetitive, rat-a-tat cadence, always overlapping and usually taking two conversational steps backward for each step forward. Mamet’s is a language filled with expletives — there are reportedly more than a…
Last October, Jeanne Clark’s Chihuahua, Gucci, vanished into thin air. She’s posted Lost Dog fliers all over town, and spent hundreds on ads pleading for the safe return of her teeny pet — all to no avail. Not even a trip to a local psychic turned up any clues. Jeanne…
When iTheatre Collaborative debuted last season, it did so with a pledge to produce unconventional, seldom-seen plays. The company kept that promise, at first, with estimable productions of Underneath the Lintel, Bee-Luther-Hatchee, and a holiday pageant that was both hip and festive. But iTheatre seems to have already forgotten its…
I’ve just seen a film that is either a brilliant parody of scholarly documentaries or else final proof that I am the stupidest person on Earth. Obviously, I prefer to believe the former — that What the #$*! Do We Know: A Quantum Fable is a genius of a mockumentary…
