Once upon a time, Cher was cool. No, really. She was cool. Long before she became an iconic cottage industry, Cher was a hippie chick folk singer whose naughty songs upset radio programmers and whose eye makeup terrified uptight parents. A full decade before the ’70s schlock of “Gypsies, Tramps…
Admit it. The moment you hear the name ABBA, or see it in print, a jangly bit of one of the band’s hit songs begins playing in your head. Maybe you hear the chugging intro to “Waterloo.” Or the a cappella choral bridge from “Super Trouper.” Probably it’s the piano…
If life is a shit sandwich, coach Devlyn Steele can teach you how to serve it on a silver platter. Steele has refined the art of life coaching, a pop-psych practice in which clients get props from a hyper-organized counselor who knows more about how to live than the rest…
The theater season is about to start — and not a moment too soon. With next to no theater to look at for the past several months, I’ve taken to watching television — and the worst possible programs, too. It’s with more than a little shame that I admit to…
Kathy Taylor is not a nut-box. She’s an artist who mixes the ashes of your dead pet into paint, and then uses the concoction to create a portrait of the late Bowser (or Spot or Boots or whomever) for all to admire. Taylor, who can also make a clay vessel…
Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins looks great on paper: a musical in which four assassins and five failed would-be killers sing and dance about the joys of killing or trying to kill presidents and other VIPs. And, in fact, Assassins is a darkly brilliant musical full of astonishingly naughty humor and wicked…
Tod Keltner and Don Standhardt want to get married, dammit. To each other. Hot on the heels of the Supreme Court’s dissing of anti-sodomy laws, and Canada’s recent recognition of gay marriages, Keltner and Standhardt last month filed an application for an Arizona marriage license. When the application was rejected,…
The heck with Novocain and smiley receptionists. Dr. Kelly Cook has the solution to painless dentistry: loud rock music and lots of laughing gas. Even without the drugs, Cook is a kick; a drill-wielding DDS with the bedside manner of Ron Wood. His Chandler office is crammed with enough music…
I normally don’t review children’s theater, but the temptation to watch several dozen teenagers drown was too great, and so I attended an evening performance of Valley Youth Theatre’s Titanic last week. I’ve seen this show once before, enacted by adults, and so I knew what I was in for:…
Mississippi had Tennessee Williams, and Manhattan has Fran Liebowitz, but Phoenix is home to David Pittman. The 50-ish “frustrated joke writer” has just received national acclaim as the grand-prize winner of Parkay margarine’s Best Butter-Ups contest, which asked oleo fans across the country to submit witty slogans about non-butter spreads…
A guy in a gown is usually good for a laugh, and the mere mention of a beauty pageant these days elicits at least a good, loud snicker. Thus Pageant — The Musical, a drag show that’s more than a drag show; a musical spoof that takes shots at beauty…
Remember how the hottest girls in high school were all bitches? Well, Vanessa Abbott is a new kind of hot girl. The Arizona State University communications major was just voted the Hottest Woman in America by HotOrNot.com, an interactive Web site where curvy curves and pointy cheekbones rule, and where…
It’s true: There’s nothing new under the sun. But if we’re doomed to repeat ourselves — and the summer reruns on Valley stages lately suggest that we most certainly are — then we might as well make it a repeat like Skimpies, the Terry Earp musical spoof that recently launched…
You’d think he raped your mother. But all journalist Don Russell did was write an editorial about what a crummy city Phoenix is. Russell, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, was merely responding to reports that Phoenix may soon usurp Philly as the fifth largest city in the nation…
I arrived at Desert Stages thinking Whatever dreck I see tonight is exactly what I deserve. And How desperate for a paycheck am I? And You know it’s summer in Phoenix when you’re driving for half an hour to see a community theater production of Cabaret. I left the theater…
It’s pronounced “Fuck you,” but Phuhque, Eric Baron’s computer service company, is a warm, fuzzy place. Baron, who prefers to be called Gailand, the name he uses in the make-believe war games that fill up his time when he’s not programming PCs, is a friendly fellow who’s out to prove…
If more part-time thespians approached their craft with the skill and imagination of Steven J. Scally, community theater would be a more cheerful place to visit. If Scally launched Awake and Sing Productions — which took its first bows last week with a revival of Michael Cristofer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The…
Swami Dâ Prem is the youngest American swami in the history of Sanatana Dharma, and a teacher of Brahman-Atman yoga. While you’d expect someone with those stats to be sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop, Swami Dâ Prem can be found sitting in a sparsely furnished studio apartment in Glendale. We…
Michael Senger isn’t just another pothead survivalist. He’s a pothead survivalist with an Armageddon shelter and a working knowledge of the end of the world. None of which mattered to Pinal County officials last month when they hauled Senger to the pokey for growing marijuana on his two-acre spread near…
There’s a sign near the front door of the Beehler residence that reads, “Welcome to the house full of babies.” They’re not kidding. Two years ago, Stacey and David Beehler, after more than a decade of trying to get pregnant, became the proud parents of quadruplets. But Stacey’s only stretch…
The curtain has fallen on another theater season, one that featured a couple of world premieres, the usual dozen-odd Neil Simon retreads, and a handful of pleasant surprises. Chief among those surprises was that the most stunning productions of the season came from one of our tiniest companies. Nearly Naked…
Although our paths never crossed, John Starkey and I both attended St. Jerome’s Catholic Church as children. I was a misfit parishioner, a kid with no keen spirituality who squirmed through weekly Mass and abandoned the church as a teen. Starkey was a committed Catholic; an altar boy involved in…
