In The Mirror Has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a Columbia University Romantic literature professor who endures a drab, romanceless life. She lives with her imperious, fault-finding mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall)–a beautician, no less–and wards off the attentions of a nebbishy suitor (Austin Pendleton) while pining for the…
Critics normally don’t spend a lot of time praising producers; in a medium that is both commerce and art, our job is to evaluate the art side of the equation. And the assumption is that while producers are raising, counting or raking in moolah, a movie’s aesthetics are in the…
nights atthe opera The Candy Tale and L’enfant et les sortileges: Arizona State University’s Lyric Opera Theatre presents this double bill of fantastical tales. The first, written by Dimitrije Buzarovski and William Reber and performed in English, has similarities to Pinocchio; it’s based on a Macedonian folktale about a candy…
thursday november 21 Three Tall Women: Arizona Theatre Company continues its 30th-anniversary season with Edward Albee’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner about a well-to-do widow who revisits the past, and who is revisited by the spirits of her younger self. Lawrence Sacharow directed the original New York production, and he also…
With its current production, Arizona Jewish Theatre Company has managed to cram both comedy and tragedy onto the same stage. The comedy is Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig. The tragedy is that this nearly three-hour-long play is enormously unfunny. Wasserstein’s relentless comedy concerns a trio of sisters who gather to…
Patient A is a small, infrequently produced play about the life and death of Kimberly Bergalis. Bergalis died in 1991 from complications of AIDS, which she presumably contracted from her dentist. Her case became national news and Bergalis a media figure and penultimate “innocent victim.” In this solemn one-act–presented by…
The astonishing documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills starts with a crime that seems unreal, apocryphal: the murder of three 8-year-old boys, one of whom was sexually mutilated, in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993. The filmmakers, Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger, let…
For the past five years, Valley Art Theatre has been gracing our community with Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, an annual collection of cartoons that bursts at the seams with scatology, sex, sacrilege and sophomoric shock. The 1996 edition is now playing, and though it has…
A homeless man stumbles into a New York fish market and asks for a glass of water. The owner’s wife gives it to him, and then, with a strange, sudden urgency, invites him home for dinner. Over her husband’s mild objections, by the end of the evening she’s offered him…
strings attached “The Wonderful World of Puppets”: California’s Jim Gamble brings his merry-marionette pals Algernon the Clown, Percy the Penguin, Rollo the Roller Skater and Yankee Doodle to Kerr Cultural Center, 6110 North Scottsdale Road in Scottsdale, for shows at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 16. Tickets are $10…
thursday november 14 Red House Painters: Crazy Pony? There is a correlation between Mark Kozelek’s young San Francisco band and northern California icon Neil Young’s brand of power folk. Known for spare, moody navel-gazing during their tenure with 4AD, the Painters turned up the volume and put the pedal steel…
Phoenix Theatre’s current production, Dial M for Murder, pits a killer against a mystery writer/police inspector team, but the plot is no puzzler. My mystery-writer friend and seatmate Karol had the whole plot figured out in the first act when the leading lady (Heidi Ewart) sat down to work on…
August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is among the most stirring dramas written this century. The critically acclaimed play, about a black American family’s struggle to come to terms with its legacy of slavery, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1990. It is Wilson’s intention to write a play…
Thrillers that involve a threat to the nuclear family almost always have a reactionary subtext. Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Cape Fear leap to mind. When a director of Ron Howard’s guilelessness makes a film like Ransom, about a rich guy trying to best the man…
thursday november 7 “William Christenberry and Andres Serrano”: The two influential American photographers, both of whom trained as painters before swapping their palettes for cameras, are feted in this exhibition, which features some of the artists’ most famous–and infamous–works, including images from Christenberry’s Klan Room installation and from Serrano’s Fluids…
at the concert “Getting to Know You”: Clotilde Otranto conducts Phoenix Symphony in this family performance, featuring Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Showtime is 2:30 p.m. Sunday, November 10, at Symphony Hall, 225 East Adams; preconcert festivities begin at 1:30. Tickets are $8, available at the symphony…
Not many people are familiar with the sculptor Lawrence Tenney Stevens, who lived and worked in Tempe from the 1950s until his death at age 76 in 1972, but those who are all take the same sobering gulp of air before exhaling, “Ohhhhh, he was a character, all right.” Irascible,…
I’ve been a big fan of Paul Rudnick’s writing ever since I read his first novel, Social Disease, in the early Eighties. That book, and most of Rudnick’s subsequent work (the play I Hate Hamlet; several screenplays, including the two Addams Family movies; and his hilarious monthly movie column in…
I hate mimes. Who doesn’t? Say “mime” and I think of Marcel Marceau. Or worse, Shields and Yarnell. No matter who, it’ll be white face and a striped tee shirt and those loose-limbed bits with titles like “Climbing the Stairs” or “Walking Against the Wind.” Right? Not anymore according to…
The swing in Swingers is in the music and the talk–the self-consciously hip chatter of young men cruising clubs and dancing to big bands. Yet the story of this low-budget romantic comedy unfolds not in the ’20s, ’30s or ’40s but in the ’90s, this decade in which style seems…
A few weeks ago, I saw a preview for William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. A woman in the row behind me remarked, “He must be turning over in his grave.” Shakespeare, she meant. Well, why not? Turning over in one’s grave is part of what Romeo & Juliet is all…
orange crush Glendale Halloween Festival: Carnival games, a costume contest and free candy and prizes are on the agenda at this annual fest, scheduled for 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday, October 31, at Sahuaro Ranch Park, 59th Avenue and Mountain View Road. Admission is free. Call 930-2842. Halloween Parade of…
