I am not sleeping with actor/director Ron May. I am a happily married man who’s a sucker for a well-crafted theater performance. I mention these simple facts because, in reviewing the best theatrical events I saw in 2015, I find that I have as usual favored productions in which May…
New Times picks the best arts and culture events in metro Phoenix from December 14 to 20. “Dinosaurs in Motion” Remember when people believed that lizard people ran the country? They’re still around, but there are enough cretins and creeps running for president that the conspiracy-minded are pretty busy. If we…
When The Mindy Project debuted in 2012, one of its two main inspirations, the big-screen romantic comedy, was already dead. Kate Hudson’s last studio rom-com (Something Borrowed) was released the year before, Katherine Heigl’s (Life as We Know It) the year before that. With their Harry/Sally-esque slant-rhyming names, The Mindy…
While some holiday traditions are nearly universal, everyone celebrates a little differently. For some, it’s truly Christmas when they see snow; for others, it’s palm trees wrapped in lights. (Can we get an amen, Phoenix?) This divide can become all the more obvious when you’re dating someone, since there’s a good chance family…
Tempe dance company CONDER/dance has announced the 2016 edition of its annual film and dance festival Breaking Ground. Since 2007, CONDER/dance’s namesake and founder Carley Conder has organized the festival to spotlight local and international contemporary dance, choreography, and, more recently, filmmaking. Held Friday and Saturday, January 29 and 30,…
Bea Velazquez stands in the center of a small gallery on the second floor of Phoenix Center for the Arts. Friends mill about, directed from photograph to photograph, as Velazquez offers insight into each individual, each portrait, each intimate experience. The 27-piece, black-and-white exhibition is getting a lot of eyeballs…
Everyone needs to let loose and tie one on once in awhile, especially Santa Claus. Given the enormous stress that comes with the weighty responsibility of delivering countless gifts to billions of children worldwide during a single evening, we’d expect that Jolly Ol’ Saint Nick really needs to go hard…
If you’ve been wanting to get your home in the spotlight for all of the wrong reasons, you’re in luck. This Old House, the longtime PBS home remodeling show, is seeking Arizona homes for renovation. Give them your tired, your poor, and your stuccoed houses for consideration, but you’ll have…
New Times picks the best art and culture events in metro Phoenix from December 11 to 13. See more on our curated calendar of events. Herakles We’d say that each performance of Orange Theatre’s Herakles is limited to 25 seats, but that isn’t quite right. More like 25 people, who…
In addition to stocking stuffers this holiday season, Phoenicians will have a chance to catch their favorite drag stars — stuffed in their own stockings — as they take over Orpheum Theatre. The cream of RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant crop arrive in Phoenix on Sunday, December 27, with a slew of…
With most of 2015 on the books, it’s safe to say it was a tumultuous year for celebrity relationships. As with most other facets of life, much of the public invested far more in the love lives of the rich and famous than they did in their own. Here are…
Comedian Gregg Turkington sits at an airport bar in Van Nuys, orders a spiced whiskey sour — the joint’s too-sweet specialty cocktail — and stares out the window at the tiny commuter jets he hates. “I’m terrified of flying, like seriously freaked out,” he says. “But I fly more than…
Justin Kurzel’s is a Macbeth stripped of lit-class ponderousness, stage-bound declaiming, Ren Fest cosplay, and prestige-film pomposity. It is the essence of this cruelest of plays, the blade unsheathed — and, as a blade would be after hacking through all these Scottish wars, its edge is blunt, rough, a thing…
They could have called it Hitchcock/Truffaut/Scorsese/Fincher. Less an adaptation of one of the great books about film than a feature-length recommendation, Kent Jones’ documentary take on François Truffaut’s exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it’s a…
There’s terrific comic potential in the idea at the heart of Don Verdean, the latest shrug of a film from Jared and Jerusha Hess, the husband-wife writer-director team behind Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and one that for good reason you haven’t seen, Gentlemen Broncos. That idea: A fraud of a…
Years after Moby-Dick was a flop, Herman Melville visited an old ship’s captain named George Pollard. Both men had seen better days. In their youth, both had sailed the seas with some success. Melville had written novels about his adventures with island girls, and Pollard had once helmed one of…
Like grad school or that cave in The Empire Strikes Back, what you get out of Rick Alverson’s bold and desolate Entertainment depends on what you put into it. It’s less a film you watch than a breakdown episode you try to get through, a bottomed-out desert lulu that manages…
We know you’re busy, maybe too busy, during the holidays. But still, you deserve some time to yourself. Time for you to leave the holiday hysteria behind to slip into another world. Graphic novels provide the perfect portal through which to make your escape: New, old and in-between, here are…
It could have ended in Dallas last June, when 18-year-old Miami tap dancer Gaby Diaz auditioned for season 12 of the FOX reality TV competition So You Think You Can Dance. Diaz didn’t make the cut that time around, after performing a routine the judges described as way too busy…
As one might at a geek event of its magnitude, Phoenix Comicon Fan Fest 2015 was filled with cosplayers of all different shapes and sizes. All the usual suspects were there, of course, including a gaggle of Deadpools, a slew of Solid Snakes, and multiple members of both the Justice…
Have you heard of this gal yet? You know, the one who made those Bob’s Burgers snails and got to quit her day job because of it? Turns out, she’s also a delight, and has plenty more to share. Simon Says Macy owner Macy McKenny, 30, is a full-time sculptor…
One day in 1964, while 5-year-old Neil Logan was home alone watching The Wallace and Ladmo Show, Ladmo held up a drawing Logan had done. “They used to ask kids to send in drawings all the time,” recalls the 66-year-old artist, known today for his bronze figurative sculptures. “This time,…
