Upcoming Events

Unorthodox and intellectual with a wry sense of humor, voracious reader Fran Lebowitz brings New York to The Rialto Theatre. Don’t miss an evening of humor and unapologetic cultural satire by this style icon. In a cultural landscape filled with endless pundits and talking heads, Fran Lebowitz stands out as one of our most insightful social commentators. Her essays and interviews offer her sharp views on current events and the media – as well as pet peeves including tourists, baggage-claim areas, after-shave lotion, adults who roller skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. A close friend to Martin Scorcese, Fran Lebowitz is featured in multiple documentaries, television dramas, and films, including Law & Order, The Wolf of Wall Street, Public Speaking, and the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Pretend It’s a City. She has long been a regular on various talk shows including those hosted by Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, and Bill Maher. Lebowitz is the 2021 Foreign Press Honorary Awardee – an award given by the Foreign Press Correspondents Association & Club USA. Martin Scorsese Presents | Pretend It’s A City | Official Trailer | Netflix Artist's Site Facebook

Take a trip to Agadez, the capital city of Saharan rock, with Arizona Arts Live and Best Life Presents as they welcome Etran de L’Aïr or “stars of the Aïr region.” Playing for over 25 years, Etran has emerged as stars of the local wedding circuit. Their sound invokes the desert metropolis and celebrates the sounds of all the dynamism of a hometown wedding. Beloved for their dynamic repertoire of hypnotic solos and sun schlazed melodies, Etran stakes out a place for Agadez guitar music. Etran is a family band composed of brothers and cousins, all born and raised in the small neighborhood of Abalane, just in the shadow of the grand mosque. Sons of nomadic families that settled here in the 1970s fleeing the droughts, they all grew up in Agadez. The band was formed in 1995 when current band leader Moussa “Abindi” Ibra was only 9 years old. “We only had one acoustic guitar,” he explains, “and for percussion, we hit a calabash with a sandal.” Over the decades, the band painstakingly pieced together gear to form their band and built an audience by playing everywhere, for everyone. “It was difficult. We would walk to gigs by foot, lugging all our equipment, carrying a small PA and guitars on our backs, 25 kilometers into the bush, to play for free…there’s nowhere in Agadez we haven’t played.” This is a 21+ event. Facebook Instagram Twitter Bandcamp

Umbrellas fly, fabrics soar over the audience, balloons swallow people, and snow swirls on the Centennial Hall stage this spring. With stunning images and gales of laughter, Air Play bounces on the edge of definition: part comedy, part sculpture, part circus, part theater. A circus-style adventure of two siblings journeying through a surreal land of air, Air Play transforms ordinary objects into uncommon beauty.  Created by circus performers Seth Bloom and Christina Gelsone in collaboration with kinetic sculptor Daniel Wurtzel, this performance was devised through years of experimentation with simple materials, movement, and technology.  Join us for a visual poem great for all ages that uses no words to bring to life the very air we breathe. No translation necessary, this experience has played from the southernmost opera house in the world in Chile to London’s Royal Festival Hall, Melbourne’s State Theatre, and Shanghai’s Grand Theatre, and continues to tour. Acrobuffos present: Air Play Artist's Site Facebook Instagram Twitter

Join us for a humorous, family-friendly piece of innovative theatre using lo-fi FX, miniature vehicles, puppetry, video, deadpan mime and ingeniously simple physical recreations of film language. Don’t miss this tender portrait of humanity coming to Tornabene Theatre! In a small downtown building, a family is about to spend their Sunday together, a family tradition. But the walls are shaking, strong winds and torrential rain rage outside and the storm has only just begun. Amidst this climactic chaos, the protagonists absurdly attempt to maintain a normal family life. Meanwhile, somewhere else on the planet, three traveling wildlife reporters are doing their best to document the apocalypse. They film, with what little equipment they have, Earth’s last living species: three wild animals on the brink of extinction. Between dreamlike fiction and factual reality, Dimanche observes the ingenuity and stubbornness of humans as they try to preserve their day-to-day habits, going to absurd extremes to keep up a sense of normalcy despite the chaos of an ecological collapse. Artist's Site Facebook Instagram Twitter

This summer, join Arizona Arts Live and Live Nation for Grammy-winning Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Don’t miss these two icons reuniting for their latest release, Raise the Roof, nominated for Best Americana Album, Best American Roots Song, and Best Country Duo/Group Performance! “These are songs that have gone into our hearts way back in time, but got lost in the twists and curves of the passing years,” says Robert Plant. “You hear them and you go ‘Man, listen to that song, we got to sing that song!’ It’s a vacation, really—the perfect place to go that you least expected to find.” In 2007, Plant and Alison Krauss released Raising Sand, one of the most acclaimed albums of the 21st Century. It was an unlikely, mesmerizing pairing of one of rock’s greatest frontmen with one of country music’s finest and most honored artists, produced by the legendary T Bone Burnett. It entered the Billboard 200 at Number Two and was certified platinum, and it won six Grammy awards, including both Album and Record of the Year. Now, after fourteen years, the two icons return with Raise the Roof. Nominated for Best Americana Album, Best American Roots Song (“High and Lonesome”) and Best Country Duo/Group Performance (“Going Where The Lonely Go”) at the 2023 GRAMMY Awards, these dozen songs span a range of traditions and styles, extending this remarkable collaboration in new and thrilling directions. Plant and Krauss, though, were determined not to simply replicate a formula. “We wanted it to move,” says Krauss. “We brought other people in, other personalities within the band and coming back together again in the studio brought a new intimacy to the harmonies.” The duo’s intention had always been to continue the momentum of Raising Sand. “There was so much enthusiasm, excitement and adrenaline that it would have been folly if we didn’t keep going,” says Plant. “We did join up and consider songs, try to work out some ideas, but then somebody would ask if I’d want to take my band to the Arctic Circle—‘OK, I’ll do that, call you back, Alison!’ And then she goes off and gets another Grammy. We’ve both constantly made new recordings. “I knew what we could share. In the length of time that I’ve been making records, this is very rewarding, but a very unusual place to find myself.” In fact, the two singers were stockpiling ideas for songs they might do together, and passing selections back and forth, during the intervening years. “I’ve heard Lucinda Williams sing ‘Can’t Let Go’ forever, and I sent that to Robert at least ten years ago,” says Krauss. “I remember riding around listening to it and thinking it would be so much fun to do together.” Plant had his eyes on a couple of R&B deep cuts. “The Betty Harris song ‘Trouble With My Lover’ was always in the air,” he says. “To hear Alison sing that is such a great way of her turning her gift around. And Bobby Moore’s ‘Searching for My Love’ is something I used to sing at school, another nugget of beautiful lost soul music which has been ricocheting between us for a long time.” When they were finally able to reconvene in Nashville in late 2019, Plant admits that it was “kind of daunting.” After all, when they first met up, there were no expectations; “When we started, Robert had said that if it didn’t work, we’ll try it for three days and say goodbye,” says Krauss. But this time, they not only had to clear the bar of their own magnificent careers, they also had the success of Raising Sand to contend with. Once they got rolling, though, Krauss says the recordings felt “very natural, very easy—and really fun.” For his part, Plant wanted to introduce a musical tradition that was part of his own culture. “I’ve been a big follower of Bert Jansch’s work since I was a teenager,” he says, “and of that whole Irish, Scottish, English folk style that has a different lilt and different lyrical perspective. I was very keen to bring some of that into the picture.” “One of my favorite parts of this is the songs and songwriters that I had never heard of ” says Krauss, noting that in addition to the inclusion of Jansch’s “It Don’t Bother Me,” she feels the “peak of the record” comes with “Go Your Way” by English folk singer Anne Briggs. “Working with Robert, and with T Bone, is always a great education in musical history.” The material on the album encompasses compositions by writers as diverse as Merle Haggard (“Going Where the Lonely Go”) and the mysterious blueswoman Geeshie Wiley (“Last Kind Words Blues”)—and even a Plant-Burnett original, “High and Lonesome”—in arrangements even more evocative, spare, and hypnotic than those on Raising Sand. In addition to the core band of ace musicians assembled by Burnett, including drummer Jay Bellerose and guitarist Marc Ribot on all tracks, there are appearances from such guests as David Hidalgo from Los Lobos, jazz wizard Bill Frisell, and the eternal Buddy Miller. Both Plant and Krauss point to the recording of “Quattro (World Drifts In),” a song by the beloved Americana band Calexico, as a turning point in the Raise the Roof sessions. “When I heard the song for the first time, it came in the group of songs Robert sent me as possibilities he liked as ideas for us to record,” says Krauss. “I thought, ‘Oh gosh, here we go’—hearing that song was the moment I knew we’d make another album.” The recording of Raise the Roof was completed just weeks before the world went into lockdown, after which the two singers were separated by an ocean for eighteen months (“I’ve never been in one place this long since I was at school,” says Plant). Now that they finally feel ready to put this music out into the world, they’re making plans for a tour that fans have been waiting to return for more than a dozen years. “It’s time to think about walking on the stage again and having that feeling of being just a little bit nervous,” says Plant. “And that’s really the thing that we both live for—that walk from the side of the stage to the microphone. That’s the longest journey, because it lasts a lifetime.” The accomplishments of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, of course, are immeasurable. But with Raise the Roof, they take the next step in a project that offers them creative rewards unlike anything else. “There’s so much romance in contrast,” says Krauss. “It’s such a far cry from everything I’ve done before,” says Plant. “I love the whole kaleidoscope of music that I’ve explored, but this is a place where you can think within the song, you can decide how to bring home an emotion. It’s another blend that we’ve got, and long may we have more of them.” Facebook Twitter Instagram Spotify YouTube Link