Sat 12/13 Five inches of snow piled up in the mid-Atlantic last week, treating residents to winter’s requisite charms: sleet, freezing rain, perilous roadways and frumpy overclothes. Why should they have all the fun? Desert dwellers have suffered sunny skies long enough. The snow-deprived can catch a drift this Saturday,…
Sat 12/13 Short attention span? Meet your match this Saturday, December 13, when the Phoenix Indieclub rolls its first short film festival. The local branch of the international independent filmmakers club is set to screen selections from seven Arizona filmmakers; fare ranges from war drama to documentary to claymation. Hatched…
Sat 12/13 Contemporary dance is taking an abstract leap forward in Phoenix, with the presentation of Dancing in C by Crossing 32nd Street, the musical ensemble-in-residence at Paradise Valley Community College and Scorpius Dance Theatre, a contemporary dance company. The collection of pieces combines ethnic and improvised music with choreographed…
Old and gay with nowhere to go? Fear not — there’s a place for you, thanks to Vern Johnson, a former health-care worker who’s just launched Calamus Communities, Phoenix’s first gay retirement home. Johnson and a business partner have fitted out the former Les Jardins Hotel with posh accommodations for…
Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe it struck you one morning as you stared in the mirror before trundling off to the job you hate, or maybe it hit you so hard one night it woke you from your sleep like a prowler in the bedroom. It’s that feeling of:…
Though white-bread Scottsdale may seem like an improbable venue for an exhibition about African-American hair and its vast implications, it’s actually the perfect place for “HairStories,” one of the current offerings at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. This hit me as I was following several SMoCA docents who were…
Normally I cower under furniture when a Neil Simon play takes any local stage, but I’d heard that Shawna Quain was doing a bang-up job in the title role of Theater Works’ Sweet Charity, so I tucked away my fear of Simon and headed to Sun City. My source was…
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits — a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see the…
Honey is one of those movies you will see (or not, whatever), swear you’ve seen before in several other guises and incarnations, then immediately forget you ever saw to begin with. Its story, about a would-be dancer trying to plot her escape from mean streets (or mean movie sets and…
Well into the third decade of the AIDS epidemic, films like Longtime Companion, An Early Frost and Philadelphia, as strange as it may be to imagine, have become period pieces. People aren’t expiring quite so quickly anymore, thanks to new anti-viral drug “cocktails.” Lives that in years past would have…
He’s got LEGOs, and he knows how to use them. A LEGO Master Model Builder and head of LEGOLAND California’s building team, Patrick DeMaria makes his living laying LEGOs. He oversees the Carlsbad theme park’s 5,000 models — where more than 30 million LEGOs replicate national treasures, from the Capitol…
Thursday, December 4 It’s been 15 years since Robert Fulghum first wrote about the wisdom revealed in life’s simplest details in his book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Now, with 25 new essays, the author’s “Reconsidered, Revised and Expanded” edition hits the bookstores just in…
“All of my work has always been about the duplicitous nature of emotion,” says prolific provocateur Lydia Lunch. “You hate it but you love it. You shouldn’t do it, but you can’t stop yourself.” That’s the secret behind the seduction of Lunch’s starkly honest statements about sex, power, beauty and…
Fri 12/5 “I’m sure a lot of people used to fantasize about Cris [Kirkwood] or [Derrick] Bostrom as a woman, so no, I don’t think it’ll be a stark departure,” Curt Kirkwood says of his former Meat Puppets bandmates, comparing his new project with singer/guitarist Lisa Newmyer to the local…
12/5-12/6 No matter what the weather report says, skiers the world over know that ski season truly starts when the latest Warren Miller film comes out. For more than 50 years, Warren Miller Entertainment has crisscrossed the globe to catch the sport’s finest practitioners in action, using stunning cinematography to…
12/6-12/20 It’s a hare-raising adventure: Love brings a stuffed bunny to life in The Velveteen Rabbit — and kids have been all ears since Margery Williams’ book was first published in 1922. Childsplay’s stage adaptation — opening this weekend at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts — finds the title…
As another holiday season approaches, all is merry and trite — and a cranky crew of local performers has had its fill of the fa la la la blah. Suffer the winter of their discontent this Saturday, December 6, at the 18th annual Bad X-Mas Pageant. The yearly “trashing and…
12/4-12/6 It’s heroine versus heroin in Needles, Guns & Grass . . . , a dark new comedy taking the stage this weekend at ASU. The “live action graphic novel,” written and directed by playwriting master’s student Laurelann Porter, re-creates a post-apocalyptic world, where “the government is conspiring with the…
Playwright Charlotte Mann has, according to her playbill bio, an outstanding handbag collection. What she doesn’t have, unfortunately, is a particularly engaging story to tell in Hysteric Studs, which is currently floundering on a late-night stage near you. I was surprised and sorry to see a mediocre production from Stray…
Like the Disneyland ride upon which it’s based, The Haunted Mansion opens with a spooky voice intoning, “Welcome, foolish mortals!” Scary objects, like candelabra and tarot cards, float in front of the screen, and we’re then treated to a nicely wordless sequence from the 19th century, a Romeo and Juliet-type…
Michael Crichton seems pretty clever. The doctor-screenwriter-novelist digs odd history (Eaters of the Dead, a.k.a. The 13th Warrior), clashing cultures (Rising Sun) and cutting-edge biotechnology (Jurassic Park, and virtually his whole canon). His 1999 novel and its inevitable new movie adaptation, Timeline, both attempt to deliver all this and more,…
The sheer size of The Arizona International Auto Show can be a bit overwhelming. But that’s a good thing to Bobbi Sparrow, vice president of the Valley Auto Dealers Association, which organizes the yearly event. “We use every square inch of the Civic Plaza, and we use the outside, too,”…
