When you dream the American dream, what pictures appear in the cloud over your head? For me, as for millions of others, it’s the idyllic images of Norman Rockwell, the premier American illustrator. Or is that the premier illustrator of America? Either way, if you have never seen the works…
Deep in the heart of Scottsdale, tucked into a forgotten strip mall, tiny Metro Theatre — home to the often brilliant but financially troubled Ensemble Theatre — is bustling tonight. While Ensemble shows generally play to half-empty houses, this second-night performance is teeming, its capacity crowd spilling onto the makeshift…
When I first saw Glen Velez perform at Philadelphia’s 1987 New Music America Festival, I knew I was seeing and hearing a drummer who made his own beat. Clearly, he inhabited his music and his music inhabited him. No one else sounds quite like him. In those years, Velez was…
The irony of most travel is that no matter how far you go, you end up in a place that’s not so different from home at its core. For Bronx-born artist Elias Rivera, it took trips to Mexico, Guatemala and even Peru for him to realize that any global search…
Halfway through Black Theatre Troupe’s Waiting to Be Invited, I decided that the three women seated in front of me were more entertaining than the three women emoting up onstage. The actors were giving it their all, but turgid direction and a talky script were doing them in. My trio…
There’s definitely something weird going on in the British pop scene. Years after tasteful Yanks allowed classic works such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease to dissolve into our vast iconic array, villainous limey programmers were still hyping them over there. Thus, the dual plagues of disco and ’50s rock…
“This is some damn fine coffee you got here in Twin Peaks. And some damn good cherry pie. But I have to tell you something, sheriff: Last night, I had a dream in which a dancing midget talked backward, thus leading me to believe that our killer is a man…
In case you were wondering, here’s the most fulfilling way to enjoy the alleged thriller Antitrust.Step One: Go shopping for groceries at your favorite supermarket. Step Two: When the smiling employee asks you whether you prefer paper or plastic, choose paper. Step Three: Seek out the young actor known as…
The history of 3-D in the movies is half a century long now — the first major 3-D feature, Bwana Devil, was released in 1952, and there were experiments with the concept earlier than that. There have been dozens of other attempts scattered throughout the decades since, and although some…
You could call it powerhouse dancing. Or, depending on the piece Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence is performing, you could call it power house dancing. Brown’s choreography blends modern, Senegalese and other African styles, and often, elements of club or house dance. Regardless of how stylized, ethnic or vernacular the spirit…
Anxious about my past-life-regression session, I tried imagining myself to be white, rich, an aristocrat. I asked regression therapist Donald Rice what the chances of something like this were — how many people turn out to have been, in earlier incarnations, influential historical figures or celebrities fallen from our world…
For 17 years, Dorothy Swanson has waged the loneliest battle: keeping good shows on television, a medium that exists as if only to taunt her. You can hear in her voice the strain such a struggle has taken on her. Her voice breaks and softens when she speaks about the…
Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatens to destroy the country. No, it is not — as the relatively brief time span referenced in the title makes clear — about the recent election struggles . …
At the time, it was meant to be read as a great compliment: Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez create comic books for people who don’t read comic books! A publisher or pitchman couldn’t have come up with a more glorious phrase, one magical sentence that would reel in the literate and…
Valley DJ Z-Trip is effectively at the top of the hip-hop game. He tours incessantly — recently headlining the International B-Boy Battle of the Year in Hanover, Germany — rocks raves in the Far East, and performs in different cities across the United States every weekend. Spin named Z-Trip’s Bombshelter…
Even before the lights dimmed, it was apparent that this was no ordinary movie première. Held in the recreation center — down the path toward the boccie and shuffleboard courts — of the La Posada retirement community in Green Valley, the screening of a documentary about two of La Posada’s…
If there’s a heaven, it surely contains a room with David Ira Goldstein’s name on the door. Goldstein has, with Arizona Theatre Company’s new production of H.M.S. Pinafore, resuscitated Gilbert and Sullivan’s most beguiling operetta without deflating its integrity. The director has done away with the stale, mannered nonsense that…
Women from other countries were everywhere in the packed house — women from Congo, Sudan, Chad, Burkina Faso, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq. The circumstances that had brought them to the Valley, and to the audience of Essential Theatre’s Playback Theatre performance last weekend at PlayWright’s Theatre, were not pleasant.They were there…
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson and Clark Gable, sneaks…
Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have — directly and indirectly — gained a growing audience in the U.S. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source — director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense…
So the feet-dragging commitment phobe who’s been stringing you along for the past seven years finally broke down and popped the question over the holidays? Well, ladies, I personally think you can do better, and that you’re just feeling pressure to conform to a social norm and probably working out…
