Despite its somewhat labored Actors Theatre of Phoenix production, there’s plenty to recommend Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. There’s the richness of its writing, the allure of its subject, and the astonishing range of emotions its people endure. This is the kind of play that used to be dubbed “a…
Natalie Merchant finished recording her third solo album, Motherland, on September 9, so by no means should anyone listen to the disc’s first song, “This House Is On Fire,” and think it has anything to do with hijacked airplanes, collapsed skyscrapers and the thousands buried beneath the rubble. The song…
A hazy nightclub is the typical weekend environment for Sistah Blue, the tireless leading ladies of the Valley’s blues scene. But come Sunday, the five sistahs will be doing their thing in the shade of mesquite trees and surrounded by cactuses. The show is part of the ongoing Music in…
If you’re a college freshman, don’t read this. Just grab your newfound peers and go see Richard Linklater’s new movie, Waking Life, then head off to one of those ethereal late-night dining establishments for which you’ll desperately pine once the real world gets a hold of you. Discuss. For others,…
It doesn’t take much probing beneath the thin surface to see Shallow Hal as an apologia of sorts from Bobby and Peter Farrelly. The brothers are known for making movies full of jokes about midgets, retarded people, albinos, the handicapped and so on, but always with the caveat that the…
The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amélie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a cafe waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
The Disappearance of Baron Dixon, which is a local indie film — or, more evocatively, a “mockumentary” — has some fine moments. There’s the scene in which a stripped-down Barbie and Ken, a distinctly lascivious cast to their fixed plastic smiles, are blasted with the pop-pop-pop of an urban redneck’s…
There cannot be man, woman, child or beast alive who does not know that on November 6, Fox will debut its new series 24. Long before the fall season was to begin, it had already been appointed the most anticipated and beloved show of the year–by critics who had seen…
Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy)…
As the year winds down, breathlessly and apprehensively, the most anxiously awaited releases left on the schedule offer nothing less than whimsy and reveries. We’ve had enough of the real world, for now, so we look forward to leaving it behind and joining the company of Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins…
Rob Becker does one thing, mostly, and he does it very well: Defending the Caveman, the longest-running solo play in Broadway history. Becker has taken shtick — a standup act about the sexes, with men cast as hunters and women as gatherers — and made it a phenomenon; 10 years…
A warm embrace of paradox is at the heart of Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead that has its origins in indigenous celebrations of life in death — and death in life.”If I had to boil it down to one phrase,” says Mesa artist Zarco Guerrero…
There’s an unfortunate timeliness to Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, with its deadly attacks on America and its evacuation of New York City. It doesn’t take much effort to find parallels between the catastrophes of September 11 and the infamous 1938 radio broadcast, with its…
On November 4, some 1,800 television personalities–actors, writers, producers, show-runners, network executives–will, finally, parade into a Los Angeles theater to award their peers and themselves for a job well done. They will, at long last, hand out the golden statues known as Emmy, just as it has been done every…
No one has more to say about life than someone who hasn’t lived it yet. While pop culture’s juvenile slaves would shout down this concept to their last breaths — jeans slung at half-mast, navel rings linked in passionate solidarity — there’s only so much material to be strip-mined from…
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and…
If you’re looking to see Snoop Dogg kick some boo-tay as an undead drug dealer with lycanthropic tendencies in Ernest Dickerson’s new horror movie Bones, you’ll have to wait at least an hour before the dead guy’s body gets up and about again. And when it finally does happen, the…
All at once on October 21, Phoenix found itself home to thousands of fair-weather fans, in addition to its usual crop of diehard D-backers. But with the first two games of the World Series sold out at Bank One Ballpark, we have to find ways to channel our fandom. So…
The only thing that was off limits was the outside world.He preferred not to discuss anything that “was going on,” the handlers said. He hoped to avoid questions about current events. The thing to keep out of the conversation, they made clear in their own oblique way, was the attack…
Nearly 35 years ago, Ernesto “Che” Guevara — radical Marxist revolutionary, trained medical doctor and severe asthmatic — was captured and killed in Bolivia by Bolivian military forces. Guevara had gone there to spread the political revolution he had successfully fomented in Cuba during the 1950s side by side with…
Just before the curtain goes up on each of Black Theatre Troupe’s productions, executive director David J. Hemphill makes a gracious speech in which he thanks the company’s subscribers and supporters. Hemphill always ends his speech by saying, “If you enjoy the show tonight, tell all your friends. If you…
