It’s a place for comics, amateur and professional alike, to test their fates onstage at the mercy of an audience. Every Wednesday night at the Backstage Bistro, it’s the audience that decides who will strut their comedic talents at the “Funniest Person in the Valley” contest’s grand finale, where there’s…
I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to design a number of elaborate stage sets with next to no money, but I can describe the results. In fact, I’m still trying to shake the memory of Michael Brooks’ terrifically horrible set designs for The Sound of Music, which I…
Matt Stone has little time to talk. It’s Tuesday, July 17, 1 p.m. in Los Angeles, yet Stone and Trey Parker have yet to finish a television show that will debut some 30 hours from now–an episode of South Park titled “Terrance and Garfunkel,” in which the farting, fighting Canadian…
If there’s any justice in moviedom, this summer’s feel-good hit will be an unassuming Dutch comedy called Everybody’s Famous! Defying long odds, writer-director Dominique Deruddere has taken a couple of shopworn subjects — the public obsession with celebrity and the ineptitude of amateur criminals — and parlayed them into an…
When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau onscreen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in which…
Festering somewhere between an after-school special and kiddie porn lies this frank but heinously melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by screenwriter Judith Thompson from the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow, girl…
For a while, it rivaled Star Trek as an obsession among geeko preadolescent boys (like me) of the ’60s and ’70s: Planet of the Apes, the sci-fi franchise that started in this country with a 1968 film and eventually spawned four sequels, a TV series, a cartoon, comics, board games,…
The sign at the entrance to the Mesa Arts Center pretty much sums it up: “Caution! Door can get very hot!” Believe it. At 5 p.m. on a summer day, you don’t just leave fingerprints on the metal handle of the west-facing door — you leave the first layer of…
Type Michael Learned’s name into any Internet search engine, and you’ll find yourself linked to several hundred articles and dozens of Web sites devoted to The Waltons — and almost nothing about her notable stage career. Like a lot of former television stars, Learned’s theater credentials have been eclipsed by…
If you’re enthralled by watching acclaimed actors meandering purposelessly around Montreal, this may be the summer sensation you’ve been hankering for. Heck, the good folks at Paramount obviously believe in this one (enough to have kept it safe from our clutches until too late for timely publication), and the requisite…
A third Jurassic Park movie was, of course, inevitable, given that the second shattered box office records (it also shattered the conventional notion that any movie starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and a bunch of dinosaurs had to be at least somewhat interesting). But when you have one of the…
Imagine this: El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, in town September 5 to launch his fall tour, stops by the Orme Lewis Gallery at the Phoenix Art Museum. He’s got a guitar and he’s taking requests. If walls could shout — and with the current La Gráfica Chicana exhibit, these gallery…
Flattened plant stems.The phrase might sound sort of dispirited to you or me, but it makes Linda Moulton Howe’s heart beat just a little more quickly. Listen to her for a while, and yours might, too. This journalist has spent the last couple of years studying the phenomenon, which she…
There’s plenty of French star power in The Closet (Le Placard). This comedy must have been a fairly big deal in the Land of the Heavy Sauce; it stars Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte, and was written and directed by Francis Veber. In U.S. terms, this is roughly…
Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her big-screen debut, Man in the Moon, in 1991. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits like Pleasantville, cult faves like Freeway and Election and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…
Easily the best performance in the last year’s wheezy The Legend of Bagger Vance was by the drawly, plainspoken J. Michael Moncrief, a boy with an old man’s face, as the local kid who idolized Matt Damon and helped Will Smith caddy. The same character, as an adult, also narrated…
One of Gary Larson’s Far Side comic’s many versions of the Divine Comedy was subtitled thusly: “Welcome to Heaven. Here’s your harp . . . Welcome to Hell. Here’s your accordion.”It’s against this general attitude that Nick Ariondo works. Ariondo, a virtuoso on the instrument most associated with Myron Floren…
“I don’t know if it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone,” Victor Hugo wrote, famously, of his novel Les Misérables. The same could be said of the stage musical, which plays in Tempe through July 21, and which, with global box office receipts exceeding $1.8…
New York painter Donald Sultan long ago abandoned the tried-and-true tools and materials customarily associated with an artist. Eschewing canvas, Sultan instead opts for heavy-duty Masonite topped with cheap, run-of-the-mill linoleum tiles — the kind seen on the floors of old cafeterias and kitchens — as a base for his…
The will-call line for The Vagina Monologues snaked all the way across the lobby of the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, and I was the only man in it. That is, until another fellow — a local publisher of some renown, at least in publishing circles — approached the line;…
“Why the heck would anyone want to do a play about that?”I’ve been speaking for more than an hour with “Tony,” a convicted sex offender, about Mr. Bundy, Jane Martin’s one-act drama about a child molester. I’ve got a long list of questions I’d like Tony to consider — Does…
Originally, this was to be a story about how Stan Lee, the industry icon who ran Marvel Comics for decades and co-created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, wound up remaking archrival DC Comics’ most venerable heroes in his own image. The 12-part miniseries, Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating, was set…
