To hear Jeff Nolan tell it, murdering Scott Sullivan was an unfortunate accident. According to Pastor Tim, it was an indiscretion. And to David, the teenager who planned Scott’s death, it was a delight. The story of Scott’s grisly murder leaks out of Lummox, Texas, playwright/actor John Haubner’s fictional Southern…
It’s quite possible that American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes after-shave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good ’80s. The option audiences choose to…
La crème de la coiffure! A mock documentary about, of all things, a Scottish hairdresser who travels to America to compete in an international hairstyling tournament, The Big Tease is a mildly amusing romp that benefits enormously from an ingratiating performance by Scottish actor Craig Ferguson, who also co-wrote the…
What’s your pick for the most ridiculous movie ever made? The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Mongol emperor Genghis Khan? How about The Manitou, in which the grizzled head of an Indian medicine man sprouts from Susan Strasberg’s neck? The musical remake of Lost Horizon surely deserves a couple of…
If you have a full wallet and an empty stomach, you can empty the former and stuff the latter silly at this year’s Scottsdale Culinary Festival, which runs through Sunday, April 16, at various venues around Scottsdale. You’ve already missed the Culinary Student Competition Awards Dinner on Wednesday, April 12,…
The 25th annual edition of the Maricopa County Fair — regarded by many as a cozier, countrier, cooler, marginally less hucksterish version of the Arizona State Fair — continues through Sunday, April 16, at the fairgrounds, 19th Avenue and McDowell. Along with the inevitable carnival rides and games on the…
The art market has done a fairly good job in the past 30 years of neutering terms like “revolutionary” and “avant-garde.” Yet the radicalism in “Painting Revolution: Kandinsky, Malevich and the Russian Avant Garde” at Phoenix Art Museum reminds us what those words meant in art before they became sales…
You know the joke about the actor who misses his entrance cue, leaving his fellow players to improvise like mad until he shows up? I have finally — after a decade of writing about theater — witnessed this horror firsthand. At the opening-night performance of Black Theatre Troupe’s Joe Turner’s…
It’s hard to escape the potent magic of pop music. Some consumers never do, hovering forever in thrall to three-minute sermons of neurotic idiocy blasting from the commercially conjoined pulpits of R&B, rock and country. (To keep this point sharp, let’s credit “alternative” music with expanding the illusion of choice,…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy, rough-and-tumble…
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work — Starlight…
Having cleaned out their home or office, somebody recently set some books out in the editorial bullpen here at New Times about a week ago, in case anybody else might want to take them home. Among them were textbooks: one titled Tensile Structures, another Real Estate Law, Second Edition by…
After decades of civil war and epidemic-level AIDS, Uganda has found itself abundant in something other than coffee, tea, peanuts, tobacco and copper. The little landlocked country in central Africa, best known here for its miseries during the eight-year reign of Idi Amin Dada, has also become far too great…
Artist Roger Shimomura’s earliest childhood memories are etched into his psyche. He is 3 years old and living in a U.S. government internment camp in a forlorn corner of Idaho — a camp set up to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II. Shimomura has drawn on those vivid, often poignant…
The idea that we are each separated by no more than six acquaintances has become more commonplace than the play, Six Degrees of Separation, which popularized the notion. John Guare’s oft-produced one-act (which is, amazingly, making its local debut with this Phoenix Theatre production) is a masterwork of dark comedy…
In the opening scenes of Price of Glory, set in the late ’70s, a young prizefighter named Arturo Ortega (Jimmy Smits) loses a career-making bout. He earns a few grand, but he’s plainly washed up in the ring, and we’re meant to see that it’s his greedy manager’s fault –…
Classical grand opera is no laughing matter. With its labyrinthine story lines, massive productions and pampered performers, it’s no wonder that opera scares away many a potential audience member. But B.J. Ward sees through the traditions and focuses on the fun and absurdity hiding just beneath the surface. Since 1990,…
“If you mention Robbie Knievel,” snarls motorcyclist Gary Wells, “you’re just wastin’ your ink!” This, of course, virtually ensures that I will mention Knievel fils, and in the first sentence, no less. “I’m the World Champion,” continues Valley resident Wells. “I jumped over 30 cars in Melbourne, Australia, twenty years…
The gun is a coward’s weapon, always has been, always will be. Likening it to the sword is like equating rape to romance. However, for reasons that can only be attributed to collective insanity, Hollywood absolutely loves to romanticize the gun, serving as an adjunct advertising agency for the firearms…
Here on Earth, the new teen romance, should do wonders for the reputation of veteran director Arthur Hiller. Not that Hiller had anything to do with the film, mind you — which wouldn’t do wonders for his rep. No, Hiller is the man who, back in 1970, directed the inexplicably…
Loose brick and rubble lie scattered in the vacant lot next to the Modified gallery space on East Roosevelt Street near downtown Phoenix. The remains from a recent demolition create a fitting sidelight for the theme of the gallery’s current show, one installation in the Valleywide “Sites Around the City:…
Having twice reviewed Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show in the past half-dozen years, I’m looking for a new angle. The folks at Actors Theatre of Phoenix, which last week opened its third production of this popular show, are quick to arrange a lunch meeting with its stars, former…
