What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely-but-true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower Fifties. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial-and-error-and-error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting stuck in the dying coal industry…
Twenty-five-year session man, front man and solo artist Kim Wilson’s vocal and harmonica work has clearly made him an essential ingredient of the Texas Blues. But to leave it at that would discredit his contribution to blues as a whole. Any blues fan can tell you how powerfully Wilson–whose shows…
Eric Bogosian’s rant hits with all the subtlety of an ice pick to the brain stem. For more than an hour, he’s alone on stage, dressed in black, chewing razor blades and spitting the shards into the audience, assuming identities you’d cross the street to avoid. The actor/playwright’s one-man shows…
thursday february 25 Hermann Michael conducts the Phoenix Symphony in an all-Mozart program, including the “Three German Dances K. 605”; Ch’io mi scordi di te?; Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major; Exsultate jubilate; and Symphony No. 35 in D Major, a.k.a. “Haffner.” Soprano Patrice Michaels Bedi and Naumberg Competition-winning…
You knew Olympia Dukakis was an Oscar- and Obie-winning actor. You saw her in Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias and in many other films. So what’s she doing acting as creative consultant to a San Francisco dance troupe that’s making a new work here in Phoenix? No scripts in the offing?…
I may see another show this season that I like as well as Raised in Captivity, but I doubt it. With this production, the folks at Planet Earth Theatre have succeeded in untangling the extravagant imagination of playwright Nicky Silver, and have spun his words into a comedy that’s alternately…
Plot is a central problem in both Jawbreaker and Office Space, two comedies opening this week: The first has too much; and the second (and far better of the two movies) has too little. Jawbreaker’s 26-year-old writer/director Darren Stein says he wanted to make an homage to the films he…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in four-by-fours with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed, 40-year-old junkie wearing a devil-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
Those of us who believe that had Beavis and Butt-Head and the South Park gang never made the scene, American culture would be worse off, not better, owe Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation a debt of gratitude. The 1999 edition of this cult-fave fest, conceived by…
The Best Actor nomination which Nick Nolte garnered last week for his superb star turn in Paul Schrader’s Affliction (see page 63 for review) is a boon not only to his career, but to the career of Mel Weiser. The Valley-based writer’s new tome Nick Nolte: Caught in the Act…
thursday february 18 Karate demonstrations, children’s singing and dancing groups, strolling clowns, face painters, live music and radio remotes, a carnival midway with 25 rides and 20 games; arts-and-crafts exhibits; and photo opportunities with a live 400-pound tiger, along with an international food festival and beer garden, are among the…
In the opening image of a documentary video, Meryl Tankard dances sinuously, sweatily, whipping her hair in front of the camera. “Dance really should be the ultimate form of expression,” she says when she finally catches her breath. “I wanted to act, to paint, to design. But then I thought,…
In Hungary, the Holocaust lasted only for a year. But the word only is deceptive in this context. The Nazis, who entered the country in March of 1944, had been in the genocide business for a few years by then, and they’d gotten good at it. They were efficient, and…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
“When I was in film school, I was the guy who was gonna resurrect screwball comedy,” says filmmaker James Moll. It was an odd ambition for the man who would go on to make his feature directorial debut with The Last Days, a documentary about five Jewish survivors of the…
You don’t have to travel to a coast anymore to experience the wonder of the Magic Kingdom. Disneyland has dropped its own little mecca right here in the desert–Club Disney. With a location in Chandler and another one opening Saturday, February 13, in Glendale, parents across the Valley have few…
That corner of Civic Center Plaza next to the Scottsdale Center for the Arts has been under construction forever. But now, where once there stood a discount movie theater, is the Gerard L. Cafesjian Pavilion of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s no coincidence that opening day falls on…
Thursday February 11 The area dance music weekly Kind celebrates six months with guest DJ Lady Kier of Deee-Lite fame. The songstress turned mixologist captured a worldwide audience with the early ’90s hit “Groove Is in the Heart,” and has remained a dance-culture icon throughout the decade. Her latest project…
There’s a character in Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky who repeatedly shouts “Let the good times roll!” throughout the more-than-90-minute-long first act. That line became my mantra as well, at a matinee performance of Arizona Theatre Company’s production of this show last Sunday. By the time intermission rolled…
Audiences for Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s newest catastrophe may exit the theater feeling they’ve missed something more than a good time. Gunmetal Blues is so fast-paced that it’s tough to keep up with its cartload of clues and myriad references to old movies. Unfortunately, the show’s breakneck pacing doesn’t disguise…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
