Last week a friend gave me a long distance phone number and insisted that I call it. It turned out to be the recorded information line for a movie theater in the presumably Mayberryesque town of Graham, North Carolina (my friend’s wife had found the number after hearing about the…
The new Mel Gibson vehicle Payback is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (co-written with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…
thursday february 4 Probably the single greatest American contribution to the canon of world opera, George Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess, is presented in a full concert version by Phoenix Symphony, with the ASU Choral Union and several distinguished soloists: James Butler as Porgy, Priscilla Baskerville as Bess, Theresa Hamm-Smith…
In his latest monologue, It’s a Slippery Slope, Spalding Gray says, “I always expected that one day all the people that were booking me in theaters, as well as the audience, would say, ‘Well, enough of that guy’s story. On to the next.'” Such a thought is classic Spalding Gray,…
It was 1986 when four women joined forces in New York to perform a cappella music of the medieval era. Naming themselves after an unsigned document, dated around A.D. 1200, describing musical practices at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Anonymous 4 seemed unlikely to attain popular success. Considering that their…
I have a recurring nightmare: I’m seated in a crowded theater where, up on the stage, a little girl is singing about poverty while flash pots burst gaily all around her. A helicopter suddenly appears, and the child grabs the landing gear and is lifted off the stage just as…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
The cold-hearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the several hazards of Hollywood “disease movies”–false sentiment, synthetic emotion, and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
Sliding, screeching and pounding, the intoxicating sound of R.L. Burnside’s guitar is full of elemental power. This is as raw as it gets: With due respect, George Thorogood, Stevie Ray Vaughan and a host of great hard-driving acts are embellishers next to Burnside, who embodies the efforts, by homegrown label…
In a stretch, it could be argued that Czechoslovakia was the homeland of the motion picture. It was in 1818 that a Bohemian scientist named Johannes Evagelitsa Purkinje first described “Persistence of Vision” in his writings. This phenomenon–the tendency of the human retina to briefly retain an image it has…
Thursday January 28 The Valley’s only public high school with a “magnet” program for the performing arts presents Once on This Island, a musical by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty based on Trinidadian author Rosa Guy’s allegorical tale My Love, My Love. Directed and choreographed by Susan St. John, the…
An open letter to the man in seat E-103 on opening night of Phoenix Theatre’s production of Golf With Alan Shepard: Dear Sir, You seemed awfully unhappy the other night. I was sitting just behind you, and I could hear your disgruntled sighs; I could see you fidget and shake…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst onto Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language combining…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’ The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this 20th-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
“Better that than he should do heroin.” This is what a friend of mine said when I showed her that Kevin Bacon had recorded a CD with his brother. I had never heard, nor have I since, any suggestion that Bacon has ever done heroin, nor that he regarded making…
It’s often been accused of being a sexist play, and by modern standards it unquestionably is. But by Elizabethan standards, The Taming of the Shrew is a model of liberal-mindedness on sexual relations. If you doubt this, check out some of the sources for Shakespeare’s early romantic comedy–cheery little ballads…
Thursday January 21 Quoth the wise bard Ogden Nash: “Tiny tots of either sex/Adore Tyrannosaurus Rex/Indeed, all little ones adore/Any savage carnivore/Of which, O Rex, though rightly boastest/Thou art not only first, but mostest.” If this is true, it’s a cinch that the kiddies will like T-REX: Back to the…
I’d like to see Kathleen Butler, one of our better local comic actors, perform in her own one-woman show. She’d be swell in Jane Wagner’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, or in one of those comedy revues where she could, as they used to say,…
Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance is a literate, witty and enormously challenging piece of theater, as proved by several dreary film and stage versions (most notably Albee’s own 1973 movie starring Katharine Hepburn). Albee’s 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning play flopped on Broadway, then gathered dust on a shelf until an acclaimed…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclamation, but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 best seller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as…
