at the fair Thunder Lagoon Kids ActiviTIKI HUT: KPNX-TV, Channel 12, hosts this exhibit from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday at Arizona State Fair. A variety of activities is planned, including coloring projects and animal shows, all with an eye toward educating kids about saving the rain forest and…
Info:Category:Calendar Edition:Print 10/19/1995 Pic Hits for the week By Clay McNear thursday october 19 Arizona State Fair: The annual corn-dog carnival opens Thursday and continues through November 5 at the fairgrounds, bounded by McDowell Road and Encanto Boulevard between 17th and 19th avenues. Along with the usual attractions–midway rides and…
Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s production of Ruthless! The Musical continues through Sunday, October 22, in Center Stage at Herberger Theater Center, 222 East Monroe. Eureka! Theatre Company’s production of The Woolgatherer continues through Saturday, October 21, at 7th Street Theater, 3302 North Seventh Street. For more details, see Theatre listing…
Remember camp? It was that over-the-top ironic sensibility that gained favor in the Sixties, and one assumed that, like Dada, in time it would find its way to the dung heap of history. But here we are 30 years later, and some people still have not lost their taste for…
“Maria! I just met a girl named Maria/And suddenly that name will never be the same to me.” Her real name is Katherine Stewart, and she is the main reason to see the revival of West Side Story, currently stirring up the sleepy suburbs at Mesa Amphitheatre. West Side Story…
The Eureka! Theatre Company has shown itself to be a bastion of controlled-risk theatre. Founder and artistic director Evann Wilcosky has consistently produced top-quality productions of plays most theatres in the Valley won’t touch. Last season’s roster included Christopher Durang’s Baby With the Bathwater and one of the year’s best…
Director Gus Van Sant’s crackling new film To Die For matches up perfectly with the performance of its star, Nicole Kidman. It’s as lean and graceful as a cheetah, and it wears a lewdly sinister grin that intimates you’re being let in on a naughty joke. Watching the film, you…
Ralph–I beg your pardon, “Rafe”–Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, his first full-fledged Hollywood hero, in Strange Days, a futuristic thriller from the penof James Cameron and the eye of Kathryn Bigelow. He’s a schmoozing ex-cop street hustler who deals in illegal virtual reality discs of addictive quality, and Lenny’s fiddling around…
thursday october 12 Chandler Doo Dah Days Festival and Super Duper Doo Dah Parade: It does the heart good to see a municipality unfetter the bun and let its hair down once in a while. City of Chandler’s annual oddball hoe-down is something akin to a fright wig. The second…
Godspell has been a source of both controversy and inspiration since its first production in 1971. It was written in reaction to a lethargic Anglican church. John-Michael Tebelak, then a drama student at Carnegie Tech’s School of Drama, created the musical as an attempt “to weave God’s spell over the…
Between relatively mundane courses, Copper State Dinner Theatre is serving up a delectable comedy called I Hate Hamlet. This amusing morsel had a colorful run on Broadway in 1991 for 80 performances, but is remembered mainly for the disgraceful behavior of Nicol Williamson. Playing the role of John Barrymore to…
Childsplay has begun its 19th season on a triumphant note with a stunningly imaginative production of The Secret Garden. This version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel is a new adaptation by Pamela Sterling, told in a straightforward narrative style that features a strong structure with a beginning, a middle…
Fife Symington’s partnership with Chicanos Por La Causa to build the Mercado retail and office center in downtown Phoenix was hailed by community leaders in 1986 as a visionary step that would help rekindle a deserted downtown. Nine years later, the Mercado sits nearly empty. Symington, now governor, has filed…
Director Carl Franklin’s 1992 crime thriller One False Move was a complex, fascinating and scarily unpredictable exploration of the tensions between the urban and the rural, between black and white, between criminals and police. While maintaining a harsh and violent moral tone, Franklin didn’t allow himself the luxury of any…
Though much about How to Make an American Quilt is lovely, both visually and emotionally, I don’t know what to make of the picture. The press materials say that it’s about “how women love men.” And so it is, but not centrally–it’s much more concerned with how women get screwed…
Get out your Raybans and suntan lotion because the Valley’s art season opens with a nuclear blast this year. Ground Zero is Scottsdale Center for the Arts, currently housing “Critical Mass” and “The P2 Project,” two exhibitions which examine the relationship between human beings and their seemingly genetic propensity for…
The most important theatre event of this decade, Tony Kushner’s epic masterpiece Angels in America, has arrived in Phoenix. It is the largest and deepest play since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? hit Broadway in 1962, and joins A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and A Long Day’s…
The word “tantalize” comes from the Greek myth of Tantalus, who tried to trick the gods into committing cannibalism. The gods apparently regarded this a fairly serious sin on his part, for they devised a horrid punishment for Tantalus in the underworld. He was placed in a pool of water…
Country living is often idealized in the movies, but director Michael Blakemore’s Country Life is about the price of the so-called simple life. The setting is Australia in 1919–just as the lads are returning from the Great War–and cinematographer Stephen Windon captures the outback in ravishing, warm yellows. The rewards…
When I first moved to the Valley two years ago, I did the expected thing–I made a visit to Sedona. I was interested in the town for many reasons: the allure of the name, which comes from Sedona Schnebly, who founded the town with husband Carl in 1902; the spot’s…
Theater Works is turning out its annual miracle: a great, bloated Broadway musical on a tiny stage in a barn. The occasion is its revival of Jerry Herman’s Mame, featuring 156 costumes and a sterling star turn. When the literati debate the virtues of Stephen Sondheim versus Andrew Lloyd Webber,…
After a vagabond year, changing location with each production, Phoenix Theatre is celebrating its 75th season in a newly refurbished home. The ample lobby, rest rooms and plush seats make the facility, renovated at a cost of $5 million, an attractive destination for an evening out. To christen the theatre’s…
