Thursday July 8 Several of the Valley’s top female vocalists–Ayanna, Karen Brooks, Dorothy Grayson, Maxine Johnson, Lady J, Kauffe, Lila, Karen Scott, Patti Williams and others–perform, backed up by Blues Ratio, at “Phoenix Divas Live: An Evening With Ladies of Color,” a benefit show scheduled for 8 p.m. Thursday, July…
Footloose is coming to town, and–for the duration, at least–I am leaving. Certainly no one who has made his living turning lousy musical films into equally terrible stage productions will miss me. This frightening trend–which I’ve carped about in these pages before–has seen the recent translation to the stage (if…
Every so often you overhear someone in an art museum or gallery wishing, “If only the art could talk.” Yet when contemporary art–thanks to electronic media–does pipe up, it often sounds like the cranky woman in Tony Oursler’s installation work Don’t Look at Me. Included in the Scottsdale Museum of…
Woe to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master–unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer/director Oliver Parker. He has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband and the skill to pull it off…
Joy isn’t a word that often comes to mind when thinking about the films of director Wim Wenders. But infectious, intoxicating joy is the emotion conveyed by every frame of this ravishing, exuberant documentary. Buena Vista Social Club is not only the German filmmaker’s most engaging, soulful film since Wings…
In John Sayles’ Limbo, which is set amid rough-and-tumble southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This thrown-together family…
Because the Fourth of July falls on a Sunday this year, many of the celebrations, concerts and the like are being pushed forward to Friday or Saturday. For the hardy souls who wish to brave the crowds, heat and parking purgatory on Sunday night, not to mention a bleary-eyed Monday…
thursday july 1 Down-home country comic Rodney Carrington–sort of a cross between Tim Allen and Garth Brooks–spends his Independence Day weekend in the Valley at 8 p.m. Thursday, July 1; 8 and 10 p.m. Friday, July 2; and the same times Saturday, July 3 at the Tempe Improv Comedy Theater,…
If aural fireworks stir your red American blood more than midair explosions, here are some traditional Independence Day Weekend Concert options. Among the ensembles below, there probably aren’t quite 76 trombones, but it’s likely to sound as if there are. Scottsdale Symphony Orchestra: The outfit offers its 23rd annual patriotic…
It was inevitable that the trend in tribute albums honoring contemporary singer/songwriters–which kicked into high gear more than a decade ago with Famous Blue Raincoat, Jennifer Warnes’ remarkable Leonard Cohen homage–would begin to spill over into the musical theater arena. A new generation of stage directors seems to want to…
The new Adam Sandler comedy, Big Daddy, isn’t just the funniest movie of the summer; it’s also the most improbable feel-good movie of the season. It’s improbable because practically everything about Adam Sandler seems so unlikely, so strangely back-assward. His whole phenomenal career–from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore, from The…
Simon West, the director of the new thriller starring John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe, likes the kind of close-ups that bore into an actor’s face, exposing every clogged pore and mascara smudge. In The General’s Daughter, his camera also tracks in to capture the thick layer of sweat coating the…
Twice Upon a Yesterday seems almost too geared for the Sliding Doors crowd. By relying on the same kind of conceptual sleight-of-hand as that recent Brit hit (which owed a giant debt of its own to Groundhog Day), this romantic fable’s sense of originality and wit is greatly diminished. Although…
thursday june 24 ASU theater student A.J. Morales is the author of the cycle of six plays about cars, ranging in length from five to 40 minutes, collectively known as Automotivations. The one-acts, with titles like Stuck, Grease Monkey, Merge, Design, Pull Up to the Light and Maker and Model,…
The clock is ticking for Tempe’s College Street Garden, which for 25 years has been operated by green-thumbed members of the community, including the Kids Garden Club. Employing a “multi-phase organic composting system and several different methods of chemical-free gardening,” the half-acre garden has, over time, been built up into…
What are audience members in for when they go to a performance by Essential Theatre Company? “They’re going to experience stories from their lives,” says artistic director and performer Susan Southard. “Stories from the audience become the works of art that are performed.” More specifically, it works like this: Members…
Disney departed from its usual practice of basing its big animated features on classic literature or myth when it made what has proved to be one of the studio’s most popular films ever, The Lion King. Yet, just barely beneath its surface, that film had a streak of xenophobia carried…
Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While there once was a time–long gone–when books of short stories were published with nearly the frequency of novels, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even 1 percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp Fiction counts as an anthology,…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers–actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer/director Paul–that in old Gaelic culture the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end they have loaded up This Is My Father,…
In most parts of this planet, the arrival of the day of the year when the sun is out the longest is a cause for celebration. Here in Arizona, though, the Summer Solstice usually means nothing other than a few more minutes of punishing heat before evening cools things off…
It guards the door, like something out of whimsical sci-fi: a ferocious-looking dog pieced together out of rusted-out automobile parts. Shock absorbers form the legs, the body and head are some crazy amalgam of engine guts, and screws provide the bared fangs in the perpetually snarling mouth. The only variation…
thursday june 17 Comic and masterful impersonator Craig Shoemaker–his repertoire includes ace renditions of Don Knotts and Patrick Stewart–returns to the Valley, the location at which his concert film The Lovemaster was shot, for a four-night stand touring behind his riotous CD Son of Lovemaster. The pick of the American…
