Kate Millett hadn’t heard much about the uproar her artwork “The American Dream Goes to Pot” had caused in Phoenix. The piece shows an American flag stuffed into a toilet basin in a wooden cage. Speaking by phone from her home in upstate New York, she chuckled to hear that…
As a dislocated audience, Phoenix’s theatre fans have to employ a bit of guesswork when it comes to buying Broadway theatre tickets. Stuck somewhere between believing the hype and becoming abject cynics, Valley theatregoers select their shows gingerly. Hype has it that 1996 is the best season on Broadway in…
By subject, movies come in sets of three. In 1984, we had Places in the Heart, The River and Country; last year we had Highlander: The Final Dimension, Rob Roy and Braveheart; and I’m still wondering whatever happened to the third pig movie. Probably intended to capitalize on the loyal…
Aristotle was wrong, you know. In Poetics, his small book of dramatic criticism, he says that the action of a good tragedy elapses in a straightforward progression, without digression or counterpointing action, usually on the same day, in the same spot. More than two thousand years of theatrical practice and…
among the animals Sleepover at Wildlife World Zoo: The fourth annual chaperoned summer series kicks off this week. WWZ staff members escort kids in grades four through eight on a night hike through the zoo and teach them how to paint their own tee shirts. The fun starts at 7…
thursday june 6 Les Miserables: As overworked and overplayed as it is (the press kit brags that there have been “27 productions . . . in 14 languages, in 22 countries”), Les Miz still has the power to shame the best Lloyd Webber has to offer. The show’s main claim…
Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love is possibly the dramatist’s most accessible play–simple, potent, lyrically charged and highly actable–yet it suffers from the limitation of a fairly static situation, and characters to match. Eddie, a cowboy, and May, the young woman in and out of whose life he wanders, squabble and…
In June of 1968, a young, unpublished writer named Valerie Solanas assured herself a footnote in pop-culture history–a very brief footnote. She did this by shooting and nearly killing pop artist and party maven Andy Warhol, whom she had tried with little success to cultivate as a patron. As played…
Peter Graves, star of TV’s Mission: Impossible, who has since retired to stately voice-overs on the A&E network, is not the sort of actor one thinks of as an old master. Yet he might have shown Tom Cruise, the star of the current feature version of MI, a trick or…
thursday may 30 Private Eyes: Like the movie The Usual Suspects, with which this play by Steven Dietz shared a title until being changed recently, Private Eyes is a complex whodunit. Unlike Suspects, Dietz’s work is a comedy. Arizona Theatre Company presents the world premiere of the play about a…
neckties that bind Ugly Tie Contest and Celebrity Tie Silent Auction: Beginning Saturday, June 1, the Pointe in Tyme restaurant at Pointe Hilton at Tapatio Cliffs, 11111 North Seventh Street, will display customers’ worst nightmares in neckwear as part of this third annual benefit for Valley Big Brothers/Big Sisters. The…
“You talkin’ to me?” Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), title character of Taxi Driver, speaks this line to his own reflection in his fleabag apartment, while playing with his new guns. Martin Scorsese’s masterly 1976 film, now celebrating its 20th birthday with a rerelease at Valley Art Theatre, has no…
In the press book for Heaven’s Prisoners, director Phil Joanou boasts, “Sure, we have shoot-outs in mysterious swamps and across the rooftops. . . . But that’s only meant to spice up the meal. The main course is the characters.” This is true, alas. The spices in a meal–even a…
thursday may 23 Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know: Theater League presents a special tenth-anniversary revival of the oft-revived all-woman musical inspired by soap operas, supermarket tabloids and other unfortunate by-products of pop culture’s ascension. Bob Sorenson directed this Six Women reincarnation, which stars Debby…
catch a wave Memorial Day at the Wave Pool: The cool pool and its companion water slide at Kiwanis Park Recreation Center, 6111 South All-America Way in Tempe, will be open from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Monday, May 27. Admission is $4, $2 for children. Raft and tube rentals…
The program of Italian Funerals & Other Festive Occasions tells us that the author, John Miranda, is an actor. The discerning audience member could have guessed that because plays written by actors usually share certain characteristics. When actors take up the pen, the play tends to be sentimental. You can…
The African maxim that it takes a village to raise a child is the theme of Once Upon a Time . . . When We Were Colored. Clifton L. Taulbert’s slim book about his boyhood in the black section of a small Mississippi town in the 1950s is childhood memoir…
Barb Wire is the feature-film debut of Pamela Anderson Lee, that Jungian archetype of the buxom-blond bombshell who’s said to have been discovered at some public event on a Sony big screen–an electronic-age version of Lana Turner at the Schwab’s counter. The Baywatch star plays the title role in this…
rock ‘n’ roll call Youthapalooza: Eight bands featuring Scottsdale high school students–Square Meal, Blonder Tongue, Stamens, Ray-Gun Assassin, We Drink Rain, Might Spawn a Blizzard in Connecticut, Regret, and Big Caddie Conversion–team up for this Scottsdale Mayor’s Youth Council-sponsored outdoor concert and antidrug and -alcohol festival on Saturday, May 18…
thursday may 16 Evita: Theater League hosts the touring production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical about the late Argentinean strongwoman Maria Eva Duarte de Peron. Final performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday, May 16; 8 p.m. Friday, May 17; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, May 18; and 2…
Can an actor’s performance be too good for a play? Apparently it can, if one performance so overwhelms the script that the depth and subtlety of the drama are eclipsed by the charisma of its star. Such seemed to be the case when I saw the touring production of Herb…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: “When the gods wish to punish us, they grant our prayers.” For the past two seasons, I have been thumping a drum, decrying the decreased relevance of theatre to contemporary culture. Now, In Mixed Company has taken me at my word and is presenting a play…
