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…
THU 12 The Invincible Czars — an Austin quartet with a thing for mixing buzzing guitars with accordions and horns — buzz into town Thursday, August 12, for a show at the Emerald Lounge, 1514 North Seventh Avenue. The Czars play a mean set of “indie-riffic-mathrockery to Eastern-European folk idioms,”…
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…
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song — the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted; it doesn’t matter. All that counts is that…
Garry Marshall is at it again. The director of Pretty Woman, Beaches and the original Princess Diaries has returned to peddle his particular brand of überschmaltz in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, in which he disguises an insidious worship of wealth and privilege as a “feel-good” comedy about a…
Most boys seem to tumble down the assembly line with their main switch factory-preset to Aggression. Toys are for throwing, army men are for melting, and eventually grown males consider punching each other senseless, hurling deadly bombs, or surreptitiously undermining one another to be completely reasonable forms of discourse. But…
Troy Tinker sounds exasperated as he explains why the World Famous Lipizzaner Stallions Tour would be of interest to discerning hipsters. It’s almost as if his horse sense was tingling, anticipating the question before it was asked. “I know where this is going,” says Tinker, the emcee of the show…
William Makuet is lost no longer. A member of southern Sudan’s Nuer tribe, Makuet was forced from his thatched hut, at age 11, by men wielding machine guns. Permanently separated from his family, he became one of Sudan’s “Lost Boys.” In the mid-1980s, war forced an estimated 20,000 Sudanese boys,…
8/12-8/31 Jen and Scott Sanders, owners of the Paper Heart, 750 Grand Avenue, pride themselves on providing something for everyone. So any pop-cultural pimp worth his or her weight in Hot Topic gear will find something of interest at the joint, be it Argentinean tango lessons or alt-rock shows. Similar…
Scheduling the Phoenix Mercury’s annual clinic to coincide with the Summer Olympics is a slam-dunk way of cashing in on all the, uh, hoopla surrounding USA Basketball’s expected march to the medal stand. True, a chunk of the WNBA’s roster is already in Athens. But c’mon, is there a better…
Saturdays When the bar scene is too hot and the club scene is too cold, DJs Natasha Diggs and Mosha know just what to mix to make the night feel just right at Tempe’s State Side Grill (formerly Zoom Room) on College and Fifth Street. The fluidity of the featured…
Sat 8/14 Things get pretty dead around these parts during the dog days of summer, especially when it comes to nationalistic celebrations. After getting hammered by the one-two punch of July 4 and Bastille Day, patriots and expatriates alike have to wait until the Labor Day weekend for frenetic flag-waving…
“Imagine That!” at the West Valley Art Museum: The current selection at this oft-forgotten spot includes an exhibition organized by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum titled “Imagine That! A Whimsical Take on Nature.” The idea was to challenge traditional wildlife artists to create images of fictional animals — merging species, switching…
THU 5 If your multi-tasking tendencies extend toward culture, you’re in luck. Get a two-fer at 7 p.m. Thursday, August 5, when members of the Phoenix Symphony set up shop at the Phoenix Art Museum to perform works by Bach and Mozart — heavy on the cello, clarinet and strings…
Mike Maas has more than a few skeletons in his closet. The budding artist who spent his childhood watching Creature Feature boasts a house full of monsters, goblins, freaks and bunnies. Yes, bunnies — both real and ceramic — the signature touch of sweetness that wife Jodi lends to Mike’s…
As a reviewer, it can be very tempting to want in on the ground floor of a phenomenon, to say you were there first when some low-budget feature with a nifty premise made its festival debut, only to be picked up by a big studio and become a national phenomenon…
Sat 8/7 When Jim Seagrave, along with his wife Karen, bought Fat Cats — a rough and tumble bar home to hot-rodders, hot chicks and hotheads — two and a half years ago, he didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye with the clientele. “There were some pretty thick rednecks when I first…
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…
Sheathed in a custom-tailored gray suit and sporting expensively barbered silver hair, Tom Cruise looks like an older, harder version of the self-absorbed L.A. sharpie he played 16 years ago in Rain Man. But in Collateral, a frenetic Michael Mann thriller that runs up a Baghdad-level body count, Cruise’s character…
Deep in the dangerous wasteland of America, far removed from civilization, there exists a community driven by fear, sworn to isolationism. They loathe outsiders, whom they regard as terrifying monsters. They make up strange rituals to guard themselves against the vast world beyond their borders. And while they may feast…
Little Black Book, with its Carly Simon soundtrack all but daring you to tune it out before it begins, is being marketed as a daffy romantic comedy in which a woman plows through her boyfriend’s Palm to uncover his past relationships. In truth, the movie’s anything but light and frothy;…
You may have already heard the stories about A Home at the End of the World. In what many viewers have deemed a big loss, Colin Farrell’s penis no longer appears in the film. The official line is that test audiences found it too distracting, though that seems unlikely, given…
