If there’s a heaven, it surely contains a room with David Ira Goldstein’s name on the door. Goldstein has, with Arizona Theatre Company’s new production of H.M.S. Pinafore, resuscitated Gilbert and Sullivan’s most beguiling operetta without deflating its integrity. The director has done away with the stale, mannered nonsense that…
Women from other countries were everywhere in the packed house — women from Congo, Sudan, Chad, Burkina Faso, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq. The circumstances that had brought them to the Valley, and to the audience of Essential Theatre’s Playback Theatre performance last weekend at PlayWright’s Theatre, were not pleasant.They were there…
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson and Clark Gable, sneaks…
Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have — directly and indirectly — gained a growing audience in the U.S. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source — director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense…
So the feet-dragging commitment phobe who’s been stringing you along for the past seven years finally broke down and popped the question over the holidays? Well, ladies, I personally think you can do better, and that you’re just feeling pressure to conform to a social norm and probably working out…
Presumably, there was a time when the Drepung Loseling Monastery could have assembled a debate team to put Princeton’s to shame. Presumably, because, at its zenith, the Tibetan monastery attracted about 10,000 scholars, making it the largest in the world. And most of those monks, according to Geshe Yeshe of…
“You’re right! I quit!”Until this moment — this shrill outburst that comes out of nowhere and startles both interviewer and subject — Marisa Tomei had been speaking in hushed tones, like someone making funeral arrangements. Every so often, she would punctuate her sentences with giggles — some nervous, some delirious…
The War on Drugs has become this generation’s Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom…
Finding Forrester is the latest film from Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at his…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas of…
So where’s the giant fetus?In 1968, we were promised a giant space-fetus floating above our heads this year. It’s not in evidence at this writing, nor is there any sign of the film that ends with the image — the seminal science-fiction movie of its decade and maybe of the…
With its Peace of the Pie program Saturday at Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Desert Dance Theatre celebrates world diversity and peace. The biggest piece of the program is an excerpt from a work the company commissioned from H.T. Chen called Warriors of Light. Of the Shanghai-born Chen, the New…
There’s plenty of gallery action this weekend to kick off 2001. Lisa Sette Gallery continues its season with two shows — “the center of gravity,” which features works by Marie Navarre; and “Traces and Shadows,” with works by Maurizio Pellegrin. Both of these photography-based mixed-media artists are favorites at the…
Thank God for old Jews with shaky hands and the inability to tell this word (G-O-R-E) from this one (B-U-C-H-A-N-A-N). Without them — and Survivor Richard Hatch, that self-proclaimed “fat naked fag” who, as it turns out, is just a really concerned parent and not at all, uh, abusive –…
If you are un patron des arts, hip to the street-artist-cum-gallery-phenom tip, you’ve probably seen Basquiat five times and even own a Keith Haring tie you picked up at the Museum Store at Scottsdale Fashion Square. You may have even heard of “Lalo Land,” the installation at Thought Crime Gallery…
Some soft, blinking light of common courtesy ordinarily warns people against squabbling on a circus high wire. But this is just practice. And these are the Wallendas — the Flying Wallendas. So, 25 feet up inside the lofty blue peak of the Circus Flora small top, 16-year-old Aurelia Wallenda leans…
During the summer of 1994, while most of the world was greeting Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump with dewy eyes and outstretched arms, this critic was grinning his fool head off at a very different tale of a lost, lone hero. While a featherweight Tom Hanks bumbled his lobotomized way through…
In assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry & June), it’s tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately constructed upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts his…
More than any other year I can remember, in 2000 I heard people comment on how particularly bad movies were. In retrospect, I think they were right. The normal preponderance of mediocrity in human affairs makes every year seem like a bad movie year, but then when you review the…
In Hollywood, all it takes is one big hit. Sandra Bullock’s ticket to stardom was the 1994 sleeper Speed, a rip-roaring action/crime thriller that co-starred Keanu Reeves. With her cute girl-next-door looks and ingratiating physical klutziness, Bullock established an instant rapport with audiences. That perception of adorableness was further enhanced…
For the past few years, we’ve been told that Latino standup comedy was booming, and this would seem to be supported by the entertainment options this New Year’s Eve. Two venues are featuring major Latino comics as headliners.George Lopez, who has appeared everywhere from The Tonight Show to The Arsenio…
