If nothing else, give Dana Brown credit for enthusiasm. A documentary filmmaker in name only, he is really the camera- and microphone-equipped president of several booster clubs–among them what might be called the International Society of Beach Bums and, thanks to his latest exercise in hero worship, the Dune Buggy…
Tom Sale strikes an air somewhere between prince and court jester–he is at once a head-honcho healer and dandy snake-oil salesman. Transforming old suitcases and book covers into looking-glass extravaganzas of macabre and mayhem, he breathes new life and perversity into the old tradition of the cabinet of curiosity. A…
Bedtime Stories and Other Night Terrors Tom Sale, Texas’ Liberace of the art world, has graced the city with a parade of wonderment. Sale transforms cast-off books and suitcases into scenes of bizarre allure. Their obsolescence only encourages his imagination. Carving and installing miniature landscapes of biblical tales gone awry,…
Dealer’s Choice Theatre Quorum ups the ante as high-stakes players with their aces production of Patrick Marber’s two-acter about poker. Stephen (Mark Oristano) owns the Italian restaurant where every Sunday night his male employees gather for an intense night of cards. The aloof chef Sweeney (Ben E. Bryant) trades barbs…
Faced with a genius rival and battling his own perceived inferiority, Enlightenment composer Antonio Salieri was a therapist’s wet dream. Love issues, competitiveness, anger, malicious intent, sneakiness–Salieri had it all. But what do you do if you’re up against the one, the only, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, musical prodigy? Though the…
Thursday, April 7 Ah, spring, the season of fun runs and weekend festivals. They kinda balance each other out: Run a 5K and you’ll burn enough calories to have a corn dog or a funnel cake. Too bad charitable jogging won’t cure hay fever, too. Start the season with the…
Inspired by a hit of Ecstasy, a 32-year-old white supremacist shows up at a Manhattan human rights foundation and declares himself an ex-pièce de Aryan résistance. Vincent Nolan, the eponymous “changed man” of Francine Prose’s new novel, could go about his transformation in any number of ways but decides instead…
4/9 For musicians, no humor magazine beats the laughs found in a Guitar Center catalog. That’s because the ads promote “lowest price ever” sales every week that, well, really don’t matter. Tags for “40 percent off the retail price” are meaningless, as that “discount” is the same as every week…
4/11 The last time the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim came to Ameriquest Field, they had a much simpler moniker (Anaheim Angels) and were a week away from acquiring another one: American League West champions. But then, during that last home stand of the season, our own Texas Rangers (or,…
4/12 Let’s look at this logically–a bunch of single men, a bunch of single women. You’re all there for the express purpose of meeting new people. In fact, you’re paying for the opportunity. So, statistically, you have dozens of brilliant chances to dazzle someone into giving you his or her…
Last year, the Simmons family of Needham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, sent Christmas cards for the first time in more than 20 years. “We send out Xmas cards about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series,” the card very cleverly proclaimed. This movie is for them. In…
When was the last time you walked out of a theater feeling shell-shocked, saying to anyone who would listen, in language more profane, “Dude, that was some seriously messed-up stuff”? Not your garden-variety messed-up stuff, mind you, like in Saw. Not the messed-up revelations of political docs. We’re talking the…
4/7 People have paid a tragic price over the decades–hell, over the millennia–for being different. Martyrs, murderers, geniuses, people of religious fervor and scientists; all have suffered the slings and arrows of social climates that refuse to bend…let alone break. We certainly have our share of deviations on the current…
Sahara is a stunning piece of work–stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every single way imaginable. How this didn’t go direct to video or cable or airplane or bootleg is unfathomable. Actually, that’s not entirely true. It gets a proper blockbuster theatrical release through Paramount Pictures because its director,…
If nothing else, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller (and Quentin Tarantino, for a few seconds), will be remembered as the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever put on film (or high-def video anyway). Rodriguez uses Miller’s hyper-noir serial, published over a 10-year period, as storyboards for the movie–his…
Does the world really need a new film from Woody Allen every single year? Yes, he is one of America’s great auteurs. Yes, he’s responsible for some very fine movies, many of them comedies (Annie Hall), several of them tragedies (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Another Woman) and some hovering in that…
Something hideous hangs nailed to the door of the farmhouse in Kitchen Dog Theater’s sublimely terrifying production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. Old sock? Clump of moss? Hair? Oh, no… it couldn’t be what I think it is. They wouldn’t use that. Oh, yes, they would. Brrrrr. There are nasty…
Frank Stella: Painting in Three Dimensions For what Frank Stella’s large and raucous sculpture from the 1980s lacks in formal triumph, it makes up for in revealing the complexity of the artist’s rocky road of development. Having made seminal paintings in the late ’50s and an array of more successfully…
Buried Child Kitchen Dog Theater stages Sam Shepard’s gothic Pulitzer Prize winner with an exquisite eye for detail and a perfectly pitched cast of actors who understand every word of this difficult drama. Or is it really a comedy? Shepard certainly gives us plenty to laugh at early on, as…
Most people realize that tabloid photos aren’t real. There is no Bat Boy, and World’s Largest Cat is not riding shotgun in an RV with Elvis Presley. They’re familiar with the wonders that Adobe Photoshop can create, even if they don’t know what the program is called. But there was…
Thursday, March 31 Our first thought was that Extreme Dance! would involve pirouettes on a skateboard or some sort of kamikaze-like performance with a half-pipe and rolling stilts. But since we don’t like blood or vitreous humor with our ballet, it’s a relief that the show is actually an explosion…
If you attend Margaret Cho’s Friday show at the Majestic Theatre, don’t be surprised to hear the comedian talk about how much she loves George W. Bush–after all, it’ll be April Fools’ Day. After honing her political chops on last year’s State of Emergency tour of comedy clubs, Cho has…
