June is the month Hallmark has told us we should wax sentimental over Dad. In reality, the towering figure of a father can be a forbidding presence from a child’s perspective. Men are traditionally reticent about revealing their feelings, so a child may be mystified by a father’s behavior. What…
It is a joy to report the birth of a new theatre in Phoenix, especially one that shows such promise in its pedigree. The group is called The Ensemble Theatre, founded by “actors and artists who have all returned to Arizona and our artistic roots.” This lineage can be traced…
Lynn Redgrave is starring in a play she wrote about her troubled relationship with her famous father, directed by her own husband. The play deals with the emotional remoteness and larger-than-life persona of the celebrated British actor Sir Michael Redgrave. When Redgrave decides to spill her guts in public, it’s…
Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey may be the best TV comics in the movies. The sharpest work to date of that painfully promising and unrealized talent Stiller has been in his marvelous TV sketches, and that is the background of the comedy superstar Carrey, too. Both may feel that they…
Neil Simon is the most popular playwright in American theatre history. He has written some 27 plays for Broadway, accumulating close to 17,000 performances. Valley audiences now have a chance to see two of his better plays in revival at two local theatres, giving us the opportunity to contrast early…
The films from the production team of Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson are big, sloppy monuments to male bonding–and not repressed, defensive, John Ford-style male bonding, either; the men of Bruckheimer-Simpson let it all hang out. The films are like Wagnerian versions of the beer ads where the…
Stella Gibbons’ 1932 debut novel Cold Comfort Farm is a sort of war between literary dispositions: Gibbons pits the fatalistic sense of Thomas Hardy’s haunted rustics against the cheery, matter-of-fact sensibility of a cultivated young Jane Austen-cum-P.G. Wodehouse heroine. As Gibbons bets on the latter, Miss Flora Poste, the result…
hot dog Bill Watters and Air Major: Watters may drive the van and pay the bills, but the real star of this famous team is hardworking, disk-snagging pup Air Major. The duo does its thing at 10 a.m. Wednesday, June 19, on the north lawn at Mesa Public Library, 64…
thursday june 13 Shakespeare for My Father: British actress Lynn Redgrave stars in this Arizona Theatre Company-sponsored touring production of the one-woman Broadway show, an autobiographical tribute to her late father, Sir Michael Redgrave. Billed as “a daughter’s search for her father’s heart,” the play includes a number of scenes…
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…
