NBC can take heart. Even as the network gets steamrollered this season by Survivor over on CBS, it’s building up some fine karma for itself after midnight. Having finally put the woeful Later out of its misery, the Peacock has filled its 1 to 1:30 a.m. time slot, Monday through…
Over 40 years, an estimated 19 million people around the world have seen Alvin Ailey’s first major work, Revelations, and this is your opportunity to join those who’ve been moved by it. Presented by Scottsdale Center for the Arts through the generosity of its Marriott Dance Series, Alvin Ailey American…
If you need an antidote for the diabetic coma you may have fallen into after seeing Phoenix Art Museum’s syrupy “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” exhibition, we suggest hightailing it — stat — to Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale. The gallery’s current group exhibition, which includes recent work by…
Very occasionally, one of our local companies produces a perfect evening of theater. The first indication that Actors Theatre of Phoenix had weighed in with a contender came when the curtain rose on Jeff Thomson’s breathtaking set design for The Archbishop’s Ceiling. The first-night audience burst into excited applause and…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a cross between the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi-shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin Romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow drama,…
Be not deceived by the Merchant/Ivory name attached to Ratcatcher; those in search of repressed emotions among the corseted well-to-do will be in for a nasty shock. For this is a Scottish working-class film, and, like its compatriots The Acid House and Orphans, it is laden with squalor and violence…
The current state of American teen romantic comedy can be tough to bring into focus. It may not even really be a genre, but rather one big über-movie, a pulsating — listlessly pulsating — mass of Freddie Prinze Jr. and Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst and Jody Lyn O’Keefe and…
Some reserved, polite reading at Borders or Barnes & Noble or Changing Hands this ain’t. The term “penny dreadful” used to refer to potboiler fictions of earlier centuries which focused on the lurid, the sensational, the violent, the debauched. It’s a badge that the five scribblers featured in “Penny Dreadfuls:…
Emily Dickinson, the great spinster-bard of Amherst, Massachusetts, died young. She was just 56 when Death, in her phrase, “kindly stopped” for her in 1886. Death has been much kinder still to lovers of American acting: Julie Harris has outlived Dickinson’s age by two decades, and is still going strong.Of…
Gil Cates takes a long, deep breath before answering the question: Is producing the Academy Awards show the ultimate no-win situation? Cates has produced nine of the past 11 Oscar telecasts, and he returns March 25 after a year’s layoff; for those scoring at home, Cates is not to blame…
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film-actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary probably…
Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 1996 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track…
In recent years, a theory has gained currency in paleontological circles that, basically, dinosaurs didn’t really become extinct — they just grew feathers, and a few of them learned to fly. Modern-day birds, the theory holds, are not just distant evolutionary cousins of the bad boys of the Jurassic, but…
Considering what’s now on display in “Swans and Portraits” — an exhibition of screen prints and two large paintings by Julian Schnabel at AZ/NY Gallery in Scottsdale — the New York artist better not be giving up his film directing day job anytime soon. AZ/NY Gallery, new to the Scottsdale…
If the measure of a good play is its ability to evoke emotion, then Love Waits is a stunning success. The play’s teeny opening-night audience (I was joined by five patrons and an AriZoni adjudicator, one of those poor souls charged with judging plays for a dubious local theater awards…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…
Phoenix choreographer Frances Cohen was first to helm a resident modern dance company, Centre Dance Ensemble, at the Herberger Theater Center in 1988. First dancer to win a Governor’s Arts Award in 1994. And first to make a dance (in 1984) based on artist and Holocaust victim Charlotte Salomon, called…
Let it not be said that See Spot Run is without its distinctions. For instance, it is, in all likelihood, the first movie for kids featuring comic castration. It’s also probably the first movie of any kind that subjects its leading lady to explosively ignited zebra flatulence. And then there’s…
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has a handful of films to his credit, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
Pornography. Say the word out loud — do you spit it out with disgust or roll the syllables off your tongue gently, dreamily? Does the mere thought of pornography revolt you, make you muse about the decline of Western civilization in the 21st century? Does it weigh you down with…
Forget that I’m an atheist. Or that the last time I heard a disco song I liked was nearly a quarter-century ago. My objections to God’s Trombones are strictly critical. In its new production of this terribly contemporary musical, Black Theatre Troupe delivers a loud but largely ill-conceived collection of…
Having given us opera’s all-time greatest bad girl earlier this season with Carmen, Arizona Opera has been taking pains to compensate, with two heroines in a row so goody-goody that Jeanette MacDonald might find them square. First there was Minnie, The Girl of the Golden West, holding Bible study for…
