If you still think of improv comedy as amateur night, let the Phoenix Improv Festival change your mind. This second annual two-day event brings the best of Valley improv together with the best of the nation’s offerings to convert all of you unbelievers. The festival was founded by Jay Melius…
Thursday, 10 Her debut CD may be called The Queen of Pain, but Colleen Duffy, the glamorous chanteuse known as Devil Doll, is nothing but pleasure for the eyes and the ears. She’s clearly mastered sultry swing and 1940s-style jazz vocals, but her album reveals modern sensibilities, with ska beats,…
A trip to the movies can be both an escape and an arrival, transporting us to different worlds and aligning us with the kinds of experiences that can enlighten and illuminate our everyday existence. There is one caveat, however; chances are it won’t be happening on mainstream Hollywood’s dime. Is…
Sat 4/12 In 1987, escalating war forced an estimated 17,000 Sudanese boys to flee their villages, many after seeing their parents killed. Only one-third survived a 1,000-mile, three-nation journey to a Kenyan refugee camp. In the last several years, nearly 4,000 of these “Lost Boys” have been resettled in the…
Fri 4/11 At first glance, the worlds of rock ‘n’ roll and golf couldn’t be more disparate. One represents rebellion; the other remains the domain of gentlemanly comportment. On certain occasions, however, a dash of leather with your polyester, and a three-wood with your six-string, can be just what the…
Fri 4/11 The pursuit of peace has inspired thoughts poetic — “We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels; we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds” (Anton Chekhov) and pragmatic: “I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace…
4/114/27 Children’s theater will disregard the social injustices of post-Napoleonic France no longer. Greasepaint Youtheatre’s all-student cast is tackling one of musical theater’s most beloved – and most sophisticated – sagas. Adapted for school-age actors, Les Misérables, School Edition retains the original production’s plot and songs, including “Castle on a…
4/115/3 In 1998, a 21-year-old gay college student was beaten and left to die in the hills outside Laramie, Wyoming. The hate crime made headlines throughout the nation; the community, population 27,000, became synonymous with intolerance.In the year and a half following Matthew Shepard’s death, stage writer Moisés Kaufman and…
Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers) and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…
Peppermint Patty would be horrified. Lucy would scream bloody murder. But Charlie Brown is here to save the day from evil dentists who are filling our faces with evil contaminants. Brown is the legal counsel for the Coalition to Abolish Mercury Dental Fillings, a group of dentists, physicians and environmentalists…
March 21, 2003though he never knew the precise date, it was the very day Nile Southern had been waiting for longer than he cared to remember. On that day, Southern went into the Chelsea Mini-Storage facility on Manhattan’s West Side, grabbed the largest dolly he could findit looked like a…
There’s theater, and there’s great theater, and Dirty Blonde though enlivened by excellent performances and Arizona Theatre Company’s clever staging is just theater. Not even the best work of our biggest and brightest can make more of this pleasant trifle, a sort-of biography of screen star Mae West. Dirty Blonde…
A man, peering through the scope of a sniper’s rifle muffled by a silencer, holds hostage someone he considers an evildoer. They communicate via telephone: The sniper insists that if his prey disconnects for any reason, he will shoot to kill. To prove he is serious, not merely a lunatic…
Even under our current government, drugs are still something of a problem in society, which means that the rockin’ and reelin’ Spun hasn’t arrived too late to buzz with significance. In modern pop culture, being young, hooked, miserable, depraved and endlessly self-pitying reached its zenith of coolness about a decade…
The Second Annual Phoenix Am Skateboard Contest rolls into Desert West Skateboard Plaza this weekend, and unschooled spectators may want to travel with an interpreter — the proceedings involve more jargon than the most technically advanced operations at Honeywell. The 26,000-square-foot skating facility is ready for action: Its pyramid, volcano,…
Thursday, April 3 We don’t think rock ‘n’ roll ever died in the first place, but for the past two years, there’s been nonstop buzz about its revival. Whether you believe the hype, you only need to believe in the beat and it’s alive and well with the next generation…
From Hiroshima to the Hula-Hoop, American visual culture was dramatically transformed by World War II and its aftermath. A new aesthetic emerged as reflected in fine art, architecture, fashion and furniture that stood in stark contrast to the harder, more machinelike forms of prewar design. And the fruits of this…
4/5-4/12 While bicycle commuting seems like such an ecological, politically correct practice, here in the Valley, any thought of pedaling through the duress of summer is just impractical. So what better time for fair-weather environmentalists to make a point than just before the Arizona heat launches its offensive?Valley Bike Week…
Mon 4/7 So your little kid looks, acts, talks and pitches like a mini-me of Randy Johnson – we’re sorry about everything but the pitching, really… what’s a parent to do? Chances are you’d be well-served by taking the tyke (or tyke-ette) to the Major League Baseball National Pepsi Pitch,…
4/4-5/31 Every picture tells a story, and Valley music lovers are about to get an earful. Phoenix is the single Southwestern stop on the North American tour of “Linda McCartney’s Sixties: Portrait of an Era,” an exhibition showcasing 51 candid shots of the decade’s most prominent personalities. Including images of…
4/3-4/6 The macabre tale of Tosca – strewn with love, murder, jealousy and evil, exacting revenge from beyond the grave — has left audiences weeping for two centuries.Allan Glassman, the tenor playing Mario Cavaradossi in Arizona Opera’s production, has played the role many times but jumped at the chance to…
It was only in 1967 that Great Britain struck from its jurisprudence the “common scold,” essentially a crime of catty insolence for which the convicted party — almost always a woman disturbing the peace by nagging a man — was punished via a public ducking into cold water. Nobody likes…
