Everyone in the audience was laughing like crazy. I saw a man on the aisle wipe away tears. The laughter was the from-the-gut kind, and it was for a song called “A Secretary Is Not a Toy.” I laughed as hard as anybody, because the experience had the same effect…
All through Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, I kept wondering if the characters were ever going to stop whining. But these were whining kinds of people. They would whine about anything–the weather, childhood, tourists and every person in the past who could conceivably be blamed for their current state…
“Making a movie is about as close as a man comes to having a baby.” Paul Rodriguez expounds on this thought. “First, you have to sleep with somebody to conceive it. “Then you go through your morning sickness; then, when that puppy’s shot, when it’s born, you go through your…
Given a minimum of competence, there’s virtually no way that a film of Emile Zola’s novel Germinal could be a complete failure. The subject matter is too inherently powerful and Zola’s dramatizing of it too inherently skillful and impassioned. The trouble is, whatever the level of competence, there’s also little…
After a long film-festival drought, the Valley seems to be on the verge of a deluge. Although shaky promotional resources resulted in a disappointing turnout for last fall’s First Annual Equinox film festival at Herberger Theater Center, its producers have gamely promised a second annual effort this fall, at a…
If an art collection is the unconscious manifestation of the collector, then two folk-art shows on display in the Valley underscore the enormous disparity in the visions of different collectors in the same genre–a genre that’s increasingly popular but still jockeying for position in the world of fine art. Scottsdale…
After having made the pilgrimage eastward to the Sullivan Street Playhouse a couple of times during the last few decades to see The Fantasticks, I was curious to know what the experience would be like plucked from the context of Nathan’s hot dogs, screaming Village activists and one more subway…
The prologue of Suture, which also serves as its trailer, is chilling and teasingly elliptical. A man awakens in the middle of the night to hear someone sneaking into the house. He retreats to the bathroom, where he huddles in the tub with a shotgun, waiting for the intruder, who…
Urinating and making love and missing your family, struggling to survive and losing your courage at the crucial moment, eating chickens and trying to read the future in their livers–these things are what writer-director Bill Forsyth’s new movie, appropriately titled Being Human, is about. This ultimately unsuccessful but sometimes thrilling…
Jack, the 15-year-old hero of Andrew Birkin’s The Cement Garden, lives with his brother and two sisters in a bleak little house in an English suburb that gives new meaning to the word “godforsaken.” He rarely bathes or changes clothes, and his most frequent recreational activity is masturbating while looking…
For an exercise in frustration, try explaining the plot of The Winter’s Tale to someone. It can’t be done. You keep trying, but you can’t get away from the feeling you’re not quite getting it right. But that means that The Winter’s Tale also leaves plenty of room for interpretation…
In his last movie, 1990’s Cry-Baby, writer/director/bad-taste maven John Waters seemed to be off his game. There were terrific individual scenes, but the film sorely lacked the unifying personality common to all but one of his previous features (Desperate Living): the late and lamented, absurdly endearing transvestite star Divine (this…
The Robber Bridegroom works hard at telling everyone they’re having a good time. The characters are all eccentrics, the pratfalls continuous, the musical numbers relentless. But all this in-your-face cheeriness can’t really help a show like The Robber Bridegroom, presented by ASU’s Department of Theatre and Lyric Opera Theatre. It…
The title characters of Bad Girls are a quartet of fugitive whores in the Old West. Three of them (Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore, Mary Stuart Masterson) daringly rescue the fourth (Madeleine Stowe) from an unjust hanging, and the women take off across country on the lam, planning to settle in…
From the street, the pieces on the walls of Scottsdale’s Bentley Gallery look like large, somber, color-field paintings of the mid-1950s to late 60s. Pivotal Mark Rothkos, maybe. Or early Frank Stellas. But those mysterious, striped “paintings” happen to be 18th- and 19th-century ceremonial Aymara textiles from the Andean highlands…
When Of Thee I Sing was first staged in 1931 at the height of the Depression, it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its gang of pompous, Senator Packwood-style legislators who wave cigars and ogle the young ladies as overtly as they can. Plus a change . . . Watching…
The title of Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot refers to the unbreakable bond between two brothers. But in Fugard’s two-character, one-set play, the brothers–one apparently black, the other apparently white, but both classified “colored” under the apartheid law–are separated by racial hatred. And so, by implication, is Fugard’s South Africa. Staged…
Richard Connell’s pulp novella The Most Dangerous Game has been filmed once, excellently, under its own title–in 1932, as a taut, hourlong thriller from RKO–but has had its plot pilfered countless times. It’s the story of the mad Count Zaroff, played in the RKO version by Leslie Banks, whose hobby…
In the Western storytelling tradition, going back at least as far as King Midas, “gold” is more or less a synonym for “trouble.” It’s the symbol for everything for which you should be careful of wishing, because you might get it. You’ll only be able to keep it by losing…
It’s moan and groan time at the Herberger again. We’ve got yet another message/relationship play, this time called Sight Unseen. Written by Donald Margulies and staged by the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company, it treats us to two hours of four dysfunctional characters explaining how they feel about each other. It’s…
Rope, presented by Banzai Entertainment at Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre, is a murder mystery but not a whodunit–the play begins with the two murderers strangling their victim, hiding his body, then serving their guests a buffet from the trunk into which the corpse has been stuffed. The story examines why…
God, we’re sometimes told, is in the details. Most of us have had some epiphanic moment or another at which it seemed likely that this notion was true, but the Vietnamese period film The Scent of Green Papaya may lend it a different kind of credence. It’s intensely focused on…
