1/15-1/31 Talk to Gus Edwards, and it’s clear he has an opinion on everything under the sun. It’s also clear that he doesn’t take them or himself too seriously, leaving the subject of his latest hour-and-20-minute play, Dear Martin, Dear Coretta, in a rather precarious situation. But under Edwards’ deft…
It’s First Friday. I’m at my third gallery opening in as many hours, drinking cheap wine from a plastic glass and eavesdropping on yet another conversation about Nicole Pesce. “But have you heard her ABBA medley?” one wanna-be fashionista is saying to another. “Oh, please,” her gal pal is saying…
Photographs of murdered men and women in grocery store parking lots. A picture of an enormous man made of cell phones and DVDs. And a guy in a karaoke bar. Not images you’d expect to see at the Heard Museum. But the Heard, like the Native cultures it showcases, is…
If Myopia: the secret boxcars of pubescence, Djalma Primordial Science’s butoh dance performance, is successful, then viewers will be viscerally reconnected with life’s most awkward stage, the one we’d least like to relive: puberty. “When butoh is working well, the viewer begins to tremble — it’s a very direct transmission,”…
Movie critics, beware: Former film student Andrew Ramsammy wants to replace you with a bunch of wanna-bes — Middle American moviegoers whose membership in Ramsammy’s Reel Truth “film community” gets them free movie passes in exchange for their appraisals. The heck with informed opinion, Ramsammy says; let’s let the people…
Regional and community theaters have an annoying habit of promoting their productions as “Tony Award-winning,” and of quoting reviews of the original New York cast, as if the quality of the original had anything at all to do with the local version. But early raves for Arizona Theatre Company’s It…
There are two options when discussing Chasing Liberty, in which pop star turned actress Mandy Moore plays a president’s daughter named Anna Foster who wants some alone time, sans Secret Service, to go clubbing in Europe, hang with friends and lose her 18-year-old virginity to a Brit in his 20s…
In order to defeat the minions of the enemy, you must survive The Gauntlet, avoiding the Pocket of Death. If you fail, millions will die and the world as you know it will crumble into ruin and despair. But The Gauntlet is only one of the gaming opportunities at the…
Thursday, January 8 Commemorate the new year by cultivating a new understanding. On Thursday, January 8, BodhiHeart, a local nonprofit Buddhist organization, screens Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion, a documentary of the events that have shaken Tibet since China’s “Peaceful Liberation” of the country in 1949. Ten years in…
Lesbian author Bett Williams likes to wrestle other women while covered in oil, hence the title of her just-released memoir The Wrestling Party. Her fascination with oil wrestling began as a tool to seduce a girl she had a crush on in Santa Fe, little knowing that the sport would…
1/8-1/11 Few festivals celebrate a culture’s past and present simultaneously. Yet this is exactly the point of the American Express Invitational Native American Arts Festival, as guests see both modern Native American art and the traditions that influenced it. The festival is preceded by a free lecture and demonstration series,…
Sun 1/11 If you’ve been searching for an ultimate runner’s high, P.F. Chang’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon is the answer. More than 50 bands set the tempo for the race, which winds from Wesley Bolin Memorial Park through Papago Park and into downtown Tempe. Local bands, playing everything from pop…
1/9-1/25 Stuart Little — everyone’s favorite mouse, adventurer and exceptionally good guy — has taken to the boards, hoofing and singing in the musical adaptation of E.B. White’s beloved book. Just like in the book, Stuart dodges the malicious Snowbell in search of his wren friend Margalo and, on the…
Sat 1/10 Whatever your plans for Saturday night, give them a makeover and spend “An Evening of Positive Energy” at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. Benefiting Body Positive HIV and AIDS Research and Resource Center, the show features the Arizona debut of the Kinsey Sicks (“America’s favorite dragapella beauty…
Sun 1/11 In David Titchnell’s world, DJs duel with tap dancers, drummers beat on buckets, and break dancers spice up Scottsdale. Titchnell, a graduate dance student and tap instructor at ASU, brings his fantasy world to life through the third annual Street Jam, a barrage of music and dance. Created…
Depending on whom you talk to, Richard Wizardry is either a madcap genius or just another crackpot artist with a lot of leftover scrap metal and too much time on his hands. Either way, Wizardry wants to make up for all the bland art he’s encountering in local galleries, and…
The theater year kicked off from the impossible heights of an excellent road company of The Producers and wound up, as ever, with a lot of cheesy Christmas shows. This was the year that Chicago’s eccentric Theatre Eclectic relocated to Phoenix, and Awake and Sing Productions bowed with an exquisite…
Not unlike Kurt Vonnegut, J.R.R. Tolkien remains a massively popular author whose seemingly “morbid” work often reflects surviving the horrors of war, firsthand. Tolkien was also a devout Catholic — a demographic gleefully bashed by the entertainment industry in countless movies, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. The question is, who profits…
For all of its inspired side trips down Imagination Lane (let’s call it that, because the “memories” of protagonist Edward Bloom are too majestic to be trusted and too affecting to be discounted), Big Fish is ultimately about one thing: the relationship between a son about to become a father…
“The trends in book sales showed that African-American authors were crossing into the mainstream with a wider audience than maybe 40 years ago,” says Judy Register, former head of the Scottsdale Library and co-founder of the Celebration of African-American Authors, now in its fifth year. Register, along with Jewell Parker…
Thursday, January 1 Whether you need one last hurrah for the holidays or you’re simply looking to let someone else feed and entertain you now that family obligations are out of the way, celebrate the new year with Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre West, whose current show, Holidazzle, continues through Saturday,…
