In the 20 years that Mark Klett has been making pictures of the American West, his photographs have come to symbolize its ongoing revision in the American mind. No longer an eternal paradise of opportunity and natural splendor, it has become a lesson in the rub between the two. Take…
When Five Women Wearing the Same Dress played earlier this season at In Mixed Company, it was greeted with such hosannas that it now has been transferred to the relatively bigtime venue of Stage West at Herberger Theater Center. Mercifully, I was away during the original engagement and so, innocent…
At the end of the 1939 film of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Hunchback gazes down from the bell tower of the title edifice at his beloved Esmeralda–Maureen O’Hara, who could make any man feel a bit deformed and subhuman. He’s saved her life repeatedly, yet there…
among the animals Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus: See Wednesday in Pic Hits. Summer Days and Nights at Phoenix Zoo: The menagerie, 455 North Galvin Parkway, in Papago Park, hosts its final “Sunset Safari” adventure from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, June 28. The event features train rides,…
thursday june 27 Lysistrata: Mike Fenlason’s Mercury Theater, dedicated to producing classic works with a contemporary spin, takes a vaudevillian approach to one of the all-time classics, Aristophanes’ wonderful antiwar comedy. Written more than two millenniums ago, and rarely matched for pure wit in the ensuing span, Lysistrata is about…
dino might Robosaurus: The auto-munching, true-life Transformer puts in an appearance at Phoenix Boys & Girls Herbert Kieckhefer Club, 548 West Southern, from 3 to 5 p.m. Friday, June 21, as a prelude to its “performance” on Saturday, June 22, at the Ford Motor Company Jets Versus Funny Cars Extravaganza…
thursday june 20 Grand Canyon State Games: The fourth annual Olympics-style competition for recreational athletes of all ages and ability levels kicks off with opening ceremonies at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 20, at America West Arena, First Street and Jefferson. The event includes a keynote address by Phoenix Sun Danny…
Diane Upchurch sees considerably more in shopping bags than “paper or plastic.” Just how much more is apparent in the 80 or so examples dating from 1985 that she has assembled into “Portable Design: A Selection of Shopping Bags,” an ASU College of Architecture show highlighting the ingenuity and marketing…
June is the month Hallmark has told us we should wax sentimental over Dad. In reality, the towering figure of a father can be a forbidding presence from a child’s perspective. Men are traditionally reticent about revealing their feelings, so a child may be mystified by a father’s behavior. What…
It is a joy to report the birth of a new theatre in Phoenix, especially one that shows such promise in its pedigree. The group is called The Ensemble Theatre, founded by “actors and artists who have all returned to Arizona and our artistic roots.” This lineage can be traced…
Lynn Redgrave is starring in a play she wrote about her troubled relationship with her famous father, directed by her own husband. The play deals with the emotional remoteness and larger-than-life persona of the celebrated British actor Sir Michael Redgrave. When Redgrave decides to spill her guts in public, it’s…
Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey may be the best TV comics in the movies. The sharpest work to date of that painfully promising and unrealized talent Stiller has been in his marvelous TV sketches, and that is the background of the comedy superstar Carrey, too. Both may feel that they…
Neil Simon is the most popular playwright in American theatre history. He has written some 27 plays for Broadway, accumulating close to 17,000 performances. Valley audiences now have a chance to see two of his better plays in revival at two local theatres, giving us the opportunity to contrast early…
The films from the production team of Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson are big, sloppy monuments to male bonding–and not repressed, defensive, John Ford-style male bonding, either; the men of Bruckheimer-Simpson let it all hang out. The films are like Wagnerian versions of the beer ads where the…
Stella Gibbons’ 1932 debut novel Cold Comfort Farm is a sort of war between literary dispositions: Gibbons pits the fatalistic sense of Thomas Hardy’s haunted rustics against the cheery, matter-of-fact sensibility of a cultivated young Jane Austen-cum-P.G. Wodehouse heroine. As Gibbons bets on the latter, Miss Flora Poste, the result…
hot dog Bill Watters and Air Major: Watters may drive the van and pay the bills, but the real star of this famous team is hardworking, disk-snagging pup Air Major. The duo does its thing at 10 a.m. Wednesday, June 19, on the north lawn at Mesa Public Library, 64…
thursday june 13 Shakespeare for My Father: British actress Lynn Redgrave stars in this Arizona Theatre Company-sponsored touring production of the one-woman Broadway show, an autobiographical tribute to her late father, Sir Michael Redgrave. Billed as “a daughter’s search for her father’s heart,” the play includes a number of scenes…
Kate Millett hadn’t heard much about the uproar her artwork “The American Dream Goes to Pot” had caused in Phoenix. The piece shows an American flag stuffed into a toilet basin in a wooden cage. Speaking by phone from her home in upstate New York, she chuckled to hear that…
As a dislocated audience, Phoenix’s theatre fans have to employ a bit of guesswork when it comes to buying Broadway theatre tickets. Stuck somewhere between believing the hype and becoming abject cynics, Valley theatregoers select their shows gingerly. Hype has it that 1996 is the best season on Broadway in…
By subject, movies come in sets of three. In 1984, we had Places in the Heart, The River and Country; last year we had Highlander: The Final Dimension, Rob Roy and Braveheart; and I’m still wondering whatever happened to the third pig movie. Probably intended to capitalize on the loyal…
Aristotle was wrong, you know. In Poetics, his small book of dramatic criticism, he says that the action of a good tragedy elapses in a straightforward progression, without digression or counterpointing action, usually on the same day, in the same spot. More than two thousand years of theatrical practice and…
among the animals Sleepover at Wildlife World Zoo: The fourth annual chaperoned summer series kicks off this week. WWZ staff members escort kids in grades four through eight on a night hike through the zoo and teach them how to paint their own tee shirts. The fun starts at 7…
