Look up the term “orphan train” in five encyclopedias, and you can draw five blanks. It’s one of the great, little-told stories of American history: the vast westward diaspora, from 1854 to 1929, of homeless children from the big cities of the Northeast, most of them the offspring of poor…
The drive-in may have become as rare a bird as the whooping crane in our home-entertainment era, but, provided your tastes run to the artsy or academic, it’s still possible to enjoy movies outside, at least for one night. Arizona State University’s second annual Short Film and Video Festival–which kicks…
It’s tough to miss the new mural wrapping the Mercer Mortuary building, on the southwest corner of 16th Street and Thomas Road. Its big, stylized figures and scenes in bold colors radiate just the sort of up-with-people exuberance you’d hope to find in a neighborhood that has been fighting crime…
If there’s anything wrong with Steven Dietz’s plays, it’s that they’re so complex that audiences rarely agree on what they’re about. This isn’t a bad thing. In a town where theater companies repeatedly haul out Blithe Spirit and where any road company of Cats is guaranteed a sellout, a production…
You’re not likely to come out of the bone-chilling documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement with the belief that David Koresh was angelic, or that he had no hand in the deaths of his Branch Davidian followers in Waco, Texas, in April of 1993. But, if you assumed that the…
Getting it on with a heavenly being must be just about the ultimate New Age sexual fantasy–so City of Angels is like soft-core for New Agers. That, and the current taste for schmaltz in the Titanic vein, could make City of Angels a hit, just as the sentimentality of modern-day…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’ latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in…
thursday april 16 “You guys got baseball now!” says Tom Paxton, by phone, of the Valley. “I’ll have to remember to do some baseball songs. I’ve got one called ‘My Favorite Spring’ that I’ll have to do.” Paxton, the legendary Pete Seeger protege best known, perhaps, for “Goin’ to the…
We wrote the book to be almost like a tuneup on your car–you’d do it, and a year later, it’d be like, that was great, let’s do it again. The “we” is Janet Lever, a.k.a. “Dr. J,” who’s speaking, and her partner Pepper Schwartz, both Ph.D.’s, and the sex and…
“I’m a true dirtball,” says David Spade, and visiting his home state of Arizona allows him “to get back to my dirtball roots.” As if to prove his assertion, he does “an impression of me on a date: ‘Come on, chug it!'” That was Spade in high school; he’s only…
My dissatisfaction with Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years is not about the quality of its production. The show’s current interpretation by Phoenix Theatre is well-acted and–with the exception of some dreadful age makeup–a technically proficient version of this well-regarded Broadway hit. But playwright Emily Mann’s adaptation…
Danger, Will Robinson! Sensors detect boomer-TV redux once again. This time the victim is Lost in Space, Irwin Allen’s enjoyably absurd sci-fi TV fantasy which ran from 1965 to 1968 on CBS, before ABC’s Batman trounced it in the ratings. Grown-ups are likely to cringe at the prospect of sitting…
Two chocolate croissants and a mixed bowl of Raisin Bran and Frosted Flakes–with skim milk. The first thing anyone wants to know when he hears you had breakfast with Michael Moore, director of Roger & Me and now The Big One, is what the Falstaffian filmmaker put away. To be…
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
Write what you know–no one in popular music has ever taken this dictum more to heart than Loudon Wainwright III. For nearly 30 years, his cult of fans has looked forward to the continuing chapters of his work-in-progress. During a span of more than 15 albums, this “one man guy”…
Thursday April 9 Cross-dressing, gender ambiguity, unrequited sexual longings–in case anyone supposed that these were new concerns of the theater, proof to the contrary is offered by Twelfth Night; or What You Will (the only subtitle Shakespeare ever provided for one of his plays). Southwest Shakespeare Company concludes its season…
There can be remarkably few Americans born between 1960 and 1980 for whom phrases like “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here” or “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?” won’t evoke instant sense-memories of Saturday-morning cold cereal. Ask a kid from the same demographic to recite the Preamble to the Constitution,…
It’s too bad that theater audiences aren’t usually interested in the evolution of a play. If they were, the new Guillermo Reyes comedy, now playing at Arizona State University’s Lyceum Theatre, could sell tickets as a specimen of a project that’s on its way to being a funny, thought-provoking piece…
British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in Sid and Nancy and a playwright in Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets & Lies). The film, which Oldman dedicates…
Rosie O’Donnell sure makes a believable nun. In the kids’ movie Wide Awake, she plays Sister Terry, a sports-loving teacher at a swanky private school in the Philadelphia suburbs, a sympathetic good egg in whom the troubled 10-year-old hero (Joseph Cross) confides. There’s not a minute when she isn’t convincing…
A Price Above Rubies confirms writer-director Boaz Yakin’s place on the list of filmmakers who barged into the opposite sex’s clubhouse and returned with an unsentimental, resonant understanding of a woman. It isn’t Yakin’s first exploration into milieu many would insist he had no right to enter. His debut feature,…
“A very interesting person!” observes the title character of the film Orlando, speaking of Queen Elizabeth. But the exclamation would fit just as well for the man who was playing her: Quentin Crisp. Crisp, who visits the Valley this weekend, was born Denis Pratt–“My name before I dyed it”–into middle-class…
