Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance is a literate, witty and enormously challenging piece of theater, as proved by several dreary film and stage versions (most notably Albee’s own 1973 movie starring Katharine Hepburn). Albee’s 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning play flopped on Broadway, then gathered dust on a shelf until an acclaimed…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclamation, but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 best seller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as…
A pair of AIDS dramas that opened here last weekend have more in common than their still-timely subject matter. Both Before It Hits Home and Lips Together, Teeth Apart are helmed by topflight directors who abandoned local stages for greener pastures, and both have been the subject of some artful…
thursday january 14 Tara Lipinski, Kristi Yamaguchi, Scott Hamilton, Ilia Kulik, Ekaterina Gordeeva, Steven Cousins and other big shots of the cold-feet-and-huge-endorsement-residuals set are scheduled to tie on the blades for Discover Stars on Ice at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, January 14, at America West Arena, 201 East Jefferson. Tickets range…
A good blues singer marks tradition by helping us define how we feel about the world in which we live. Great blues singers, like Joplin, Holiday or Bessie Smith, redefine that tradition by letting us glimpse their own worlds. Somehow, the more unique their vocal expressions, the more universal their…
The great attorneys of our time–Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks–must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man and a deep-fried Presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil Action as a greedy…
No less conservative a publication than Reader’s Digest long ago proclaimed laughter the best medicine, but according to Patch Adams, the medical establishment is nowhere near that perception. The movie, freely based on the true-life tale of Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams, is set up as the story of a saintly…
Wes Martin is a guy who does not subscribe to the commonly held belief that culture in the Valley stops at the Black Canyon freeway. As a 10-year veteran director and performer with Theatreworks, he has seen productions as diversified as The Music Man, Pippin and Marat/Sade all do great…
thursday january 7 “Abstracted Water,” a show of startling photographs of shrouded human figures in natural settings by Ann Simmons-Myers, opens with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday, January 7, at Vanier Fine Art, and continues through Wednesday, January 27. Also displayed are western landscapes–emphasizing river and stream…
Two students go to a carnival, where they run afoul of a sinister mesmerist and his somnambulistic slave, who commits murders at his master’s command. One of the students is killed, and the other’s girlfriend is abducted. But this is only the beginning of the plot convolutions in Robert Wiene’s…
The Phoenix Art Museum has wasted little time in living up to the cultural promise of its expansion and renovation. Barely two years into its new digs, the museum is drawing record crowds with its exhibition of Egyptian art and artifacts. Since it opened in October, the mummy show, as…
With this review, I join the cacophony of critics and flacks heralding the latest tribute to George and Ira Gershwin. The Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm, a new musical revue that’s parked briefly at the Herberger Theater Center on its way to Broadway, is the most impressive, most opulent staging of Gershwin…
On the day after Christmas, I found myself at Circus Flora, a spectacle I opted for over yet another Neil Simon comedy at the Herberger. Circus Flora, performed in a big, plastic tent in Scottsdale, began with an unscheduled performance by me: Singled out by the clown for not having…
Given the manipulative tendencies of many mainstream pictures, Stepmom easily could have slipped into a sticky morass of sentimentality and melodrama. Instead, it proves a genuinely affecting movie that approaches its adult themes with intelligence, maturity and rare authenticity. The film stars Susan Sarandon as Jackie, a divorced mother of…
In 1933, producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack and pioneering animator Willis O’Brien created one of this century’s most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing: As if appalled at what they had wrought–but also delighted at the money it made them–they spent…
Exploding from the industrial murk of late-’60s Birmingham, England, Black Sabbath almost single-handedly created the genre known as heavy metal. The band became infamous for its ultraheavy riffs, as well as for themes more akin to Rosemary’s Baby than to the reigning flower power of the day. But a decade…
The past year has been filled with good films . . . interesting films . . . worthwhile films. In fact, there were many that I think of as being wonderful or droll or whatever. But 1998 failed to produce a single film to which the term “great” might be…
Were the Kennedys complicitous in the death of Marilyn Monroe? Did the government cover up an alien crash-landing at Roswell, New Mexico? Were the Clintons involved in the death of Vince Foster? Was Christopher Marlowe, or perhaps Sir Francis Bacon, the actual author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare?…
Did you know that here in Arizona we are, by order of the governor herself, smack in the middle of statewide tribute to composer Frederic Chopin? Yes, a proclamation signed by Jane Dee Hull on October 22 declares November 1, 1998, through February 28, 1999, “A Tribute to Chopin Season.”…
thursday december 31 There’s a local angle on the massive metal show featuring Black Sabbath, with Pantera, Megadeth, and Soulfly in support: That last band’s founder, Max Cavalera, formerly of Brazil’s political-thrash outfit Sepultura, is now a Valley resident. For more info on the Brobdingnagian head-bang-fest, slated for Thursday, December…
For more than 150 years, photographers have been busily snapping opposing realities and versions of the truth. They’ve wielded cameras as tools of analysis and exploration, to clarify mysteries and bring the distant near. And they’ve used them as tools of expression, to make enigmas of the commonplace. There’s plenty…
