thursday november 12 Phoenix College’s theater-arts department continues its season with The Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade imaginaire), the last comic masterpiece of the great French dramatist Moliere, freely adapted by its director, Larry Soller. It’s the story of Argan, who is sure that he’s gravely ill, and who is encouraged…
Anyone who’s seen choreographer David Rousseve’s dances broadcast on PBS or live in Arizona in the past several years knows he likes to populate the stage like it’s a small town. As he did in Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams at Gammage in 1994 and, more recently, in Dry Each Other’s Tears…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
Fifteen minutes into Velvet Goldmine, director Todd Haynes’ love letter to England’s glam-rock scene of the late Sixties/early Seventies, the film has already promised to be many things: a missing-person mystery; a meticulous period piece; an essay on sexually liberated dandyism; a quasi-musical; a portrait of the Machiavellian as an…
Before Universal released Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958, it added some new scenes, and fiddled with the editing and the soundtrack–all without the director’s consent or cooperation. Crushed after screening a pre-debut cut of the film, Welles fired off a 58-page memo to the studio, detailing his objections,…
Trey Parker’s Cannibal! The Musical is, I think, the best live-action American movie musical of the ’90s. But such praise may actually be too faint–the film is better than most of the animated ones, too. I couldn’t remember three notes of any of the songs from Hercules or Mulan, but…
With apologies to James Brown, Henry Rollins is truly the hardest-working man in show business. The guy has never met a spare moment that he couldn’t fill–between recording and tours with the Rollins Band, he heads up the 2.13.61 publishing house, and has released some dozen of his own books…
thursday november 5 In Mixed Company kicks off its fifth season with the Southwest premiere of Someone’s Knocking, “an odd little comedy that takes an absurdist look at an agoraphobic American housewife . . . whose marriage and life change radically when Opportunity literally knocks on the door.” The company’s…
Just what do these guys think they are doing? That’s the question that Penn & Teller bring to mind. Is it comedy, magic or performance art? Are they there to entertain or to make fools of the crowd? Are they cheerful hustlers or maybe agents of some dark force? If…
A pair of plays that hovers tantalizingly between success and failure caught my attention this past weekend. Both of them are commentaries on racial discrimination, and each is well-written and–unfortunately, in their Phoenix debuts–inexpertly directed. Black Theatre Troupe’s Avenue X, now playing at the Helen K. Mason Center for the…
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
In 1994’s The Monster (Il mostro), his last film to gain wide American release, the Italian writer/director/star Roberto Benigni put himself at the center of a mistaken-identity farce about a serial killer. In Life Is Beautiful (La vita e# bella), Benigni plays a wacky, high-spirited man who convinces his young…
A young couple arrives at a rural cemetery to decorate their father’s grave. Both thin and blond, they look like siblings. But they’re not–just amateur actors in a low-budget movie. Minutes into the visit, the brother, Johnny, begins to carp about having to visit the grave–he no longer even recalls…
Holy flyin’ fried chicken! Comb out your best wig, whip up a batch of banana puddin’ and practice your Camel Walk! SCOTS is comin’ to town! This finger-lickin’ foursome, better known as Southern Culture on the Skids, has been dishing up its distinctive version of trailer-park twang since 1985. Based…
Thanks to the success of shows like Riverdance and Stomp, dance programs with vaguely cultural themes have formed a kick line across the country. The latest entry in this dance marathon, Forever Tango, features 14 world-class hoofers, an 11-piece orchestra, and a vocalist, all of them selling the story of…
thursday october 29 Regarded as a “comic’s comic,” standup man Dave Attell, who’s been seen on Letterman and Conan, is also a veteran comedy writer whose credits include Saturday Night Live, The Jon Stewart Show and Everybody Loves Raymond. Attell takes the stage at 8 p.m. Thursday, October 29; 8…
Great art from past civilizations always seems to contain more future than past. Some of that might be because of the money and grandiose faith we cast in the direction of old treasures and the cliche of “art for the ages.” Yet you can trace much of the verve in…
I figured I wouldn’t like Barry Williams. I expected that if I didn’t find him personally repellent, I’d at least hate his performance in The Music Man, which I saw last weekend in Tucson, and which opened in Phoenix on October 20. I don’t have anything against Williams, who’s best…
It comes as no surprise to learn that Paul Devlin, the producer, director and editor of SlamNation, is an Emmy winner for his work on TV sports shows like NBC and CBS Olympic coverage and Extreme Games 101 on ESPN2. SlamNation is a documentary chronicle of the 1996 National Poetry…
At the beginning of Gary Ross’ Pleasantville, fraternal twins who are unhappy suburban teenagers (is there any other kind?) fall down the rabbit hole of their television set and find themselves trapped in a parallel universe: a Fifties sitcom of the same name in which the family is more idealized…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. And yet this brutal film borders on being brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central performance…
thursday october 22 Coming at a time of growing curiosity and concern about the nature of the Valley’s own emerging urban sprawl, ASU’s Western Humanities conference will present a spectrum of bright talk about the cultures of cities, “Cities on the Edge,” which will view city culture through the varied…
