The heck with lap dancing. Tara Eivers, owner of Sinbad’s restaurant in Tempe, has the jump on the next hot trend in entertainment. Several nights a week, Sinbad’s features a bevy of belly dancers who shake their coin-heavy hips and bejeweled fannies at the dinner trade. For the price of…
Just to admit this up front, my ideal concept of musical comedy involves Bryan Adams and Dave Matthews garroting each other onstage with their own damnable guitar strings. Nonetheless, even viewers with a more centrist appreciation of the genre may feel disappointed by this friendly new folk music curiosity called…
Thursday, May 8 Talk about getting off to a good start. Comedian Aries Spears, known for his hilarious sketches on MAD TV, got his foot in the door of the entertainment industry with a debut on HBO’s Def Comedy Jam when he was only 16. It didn’t take long for…
Sat 5/10 With a little imagination, the seemingly divergent can become surprisingly complementary. Combine the highlights of a football game with a night at the symphony, for instance, and you’ve got an interesting outing: Sipping wine from 32-ounce plastic cups and waving giant foam oboes, audience members stomp in unison…
ONGOING You want to go hiking, but you’re new to Arizona, or your partner is a spud, or you just need a new outdoor crew. The Arizona Motorola Hiking Club, a.k.a. The Trailblazers, invites you to join them for day hikes in some of the prettiest spots in Arizona. Formerly…
5/9-5/11 The endlessly optimistic Thomas the Tank Engine is rolling into Arizona. The modern-day equivalent to Watty Piper’s Little Engine That Could (“I think I can, I think I can”), Thomas has won the hearts and minds of many a tyke during his travels. Thomas pulls into the Grand Canyon…
5/8-5/31 With boldly colored canvases recently hung on the pristine white walls, David White, owner and director of downtown’s New Urban Art, beams with satisfaction at the work in his new exhibition. “This is optimistic art,” he says.Indeed, the work from Berlin-based Jean Milu Truesdale, Italian-born Marco Casentini, and prominent…
5/9-6/1 In 1998, the musical Parade swept Broadway with its tragic tale of a man accused and murdered for a crime he didn’t commit. Based on the true story of Leo Frank, who was tried and lynched for the murder of one of his employees in 1917, the musical won…
He claims to be blacklisted and close to busto. Thirty years in the film biz, with a cult bigger than David Koresh’s and a disemboweled body of work that would make any studio boss blood-red with envy, and still he kvetches in a voice so eerily similar to that of…
Spinning Into Butter is an Important Play, one of those that are lauded practically from their first curtain call for being brave and smart and honest in their depiction of difficult subjects. Rebecca Gilman’s work probes hidden racism and political correctness, and is based on an incident that occurred at…
Ol’ Blue Eyes is history, but Ol’ Brown Eyes — a.k.a. The Don — is with us still. You’ll find him every weekend in the Marriott Camelback Inn’s supper club, sounding an awful lot like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and especially Dean Martin. The former B-movie actor and part-time…
At some fast-approaching point in pop culture evolution, we’re due to hit Total Outsider Saturation, wherein everybody is an outsider and therefore there is no longer an outside. In the fleeting meantime, we have scintillating reminders of the struggle like X2: X-Men United, the latest bid from comic book land…
Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…
It is rare to find a film that defies one’s expectations as sweetly and satisfyingly as this coming-of-age comedy-drama from first-time feature writer-director Peter Sollett. The surprise isn’t in the plot — that would be too easy — but, rather, in the extraordinarily subtle and convincing ways the characters grow…
“I’m guessing this is pretty much the point of this movie, the reason it was made,” says Bob Hoag, sounding disappointed. The lead singer of Go Reflex and all-around impresario behind the thriving Mesa rock music scene is sitting in a theater at Superstition Springs Center. On screen, meanwhile, two…
Toe tappers all around the world decided about eight years ago that it was high time for an entire week dedicated to dance. So they put their jazz hands together and created National Dance Week, designated as the last week in April each year. They’re currently still lobbying for national…
Thursday, May 1 Film Forward, a new film series at Madstone Theaters, offers the freshest batch of independent films to hit the Valley since the Phoenix Film Festival. Featuring two debut movies every two weeks starting Thursday, May 1, the series offers the only chance to see these films locally…
This weekend’s Cinco de Mayo Phoenix Festival is set to celebrate Mexico’s 1862 Battle of Puebla victory in a big way: by piling up the world’s largest plate of nachos. Some 200,000 revelers are expected at the three-day fiesta, where the chips will be stacked so high that the Guinness…
Thu 5/1 We’ve thought long and hard about it — there’s no other puppet show quite like Puppetry of the Penis. When was the last time you saw such a ballsy performance?There’s a strong buzz about this stage show that’s selling out theaters from London to New York to Los…
Sat 5/3 Hide your heaps — Bigfoot’s a-thundering this way. Be there! Be there! Be there! — on Saturday, May 3, at 7 p.m. as Gravedigger, Bounty Hunter, Maximum Destruction, Scarlet Bandit, Monster Mutt and more roar into town for the Coors Monster Truck and Jet Car Jam at Firebird…
5/1-5/11 The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks, a powerful Japanese folktale turned children’s play, begins when a cruel lord captures a Mandarin duck because he covets his exquisite plumage. When a kitchen servant sees that the enforced captivity is destroying the bird’s beauty, she frees him, causing the evil lord…
5/1-5/31 Plump infants, a Pietà scene and a man meditating in the lotus position are among the timeless images in artist Casey McKee’s latest exhibition, “Iconoclast,” which he suggests reflects a new direction in his work. “It’s a series I’ve been thinking about for at least a year and a…
