All the Pretty Things Peep Show at Surly Wench Sunday
When's the last time you saw a good burlesque show of the Gypsy Rose Lee variety, complete with freakish side shows?
If the answer is too long ago or never, peep this: The Pretty Things Peepshow, a national touring act of some repute, will perform at the Surly Wench Pub on Sunday night.
The vintage bumping, and the grinding, with perhaps some old-fashioned sword-swallowing along the way, starts at 10 p.m. Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door.
There will be pasties.
And, last we heard, rockabilly music. A perfect caper for Rodeo Week, whadayathink?
Sunday's show at the Wench, 424 N. Fourth Ave., will also feature "local guests Fanny Galore and Natasha Noir," according to Pretty Thing's Web site.
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85th Rodeo Parade is next Thursday
Given the current economic downturn, when cutbacks and service reductions trump all else, we should have known that the other horseshoe would drop on the eternal clip-clop, plop-plop, of the Rodeo Parade.
Yes, pardner, next Thursday's La Fiesta de Los Vaqueros parade will be about 30 percent shorter. Instead of starting at South Park Avenue and East Ajo Way, as it has since moving to the south side in 1991, it will now commence at 9 a.m. at Park and East Fair Street, head south on Park to East Irvington Road and west to South Sixth Avenue. Grab a spot by the curb or sit in the grandstands (parade day, it's $7; $5 age 12 and under).
The 85-year-old parade, once billed as the nation's longest non-motorized parade, will have 120 entries this year, about the same as in 2009. In the old days downtown, and before time constraints imposed by live TV, the parade routinely had 500-plus entries.
But one thing hasn't changed. Schoolkids still get the day off to eyeball the bands, the horses, the wagons full of waving cowgirls, pioneers and big wigs.
The 2010 grand marshal? James "Big Jim" Griffith.
Japanese drumming at UA's Centennial Hall on Saturday
The Sunday Times of London best describes what you will experience with the "TAO: Martial Art of Drumming" show at Centennial Hall on Saturday:
"(They are) fiercely fit wadaiko drummers, sweating and grunting and generating enough power to spin a turbine…. The sound and the fury are electrifying."
The choreography and Japanese drumming combine for what the Chicago Tribune called "incomparable muscular zeal."
Saturday's show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $29-$59 through www.uapresents.org or by calling 621-3341.
The blues of Zac Harmon next Thursday at Congress
The Southern Arizona Blues Heritage Foundation has a good one cooked up for us a week from tonight: Zac Harmon at Club Congress (tickets $10). Harmon and the Mid South Blues Revue were named "best unsigned blues band" at the 2004 International Blues Challenge, just so you know. Info: www.azblues.org and hotelcongress.com
As it happens, another hotshot blues artist, Kelley Hunt, will perform on the same night, across the street at the Rialto. For info on that one, go to rialtotheater.com
Terry Pratchett's 'Nation,' from London stage to Loft
Even those of us who don't know Terry Pratchett from Nurse Ratched have heard of London's National Theatre. The NT's staging of Pratchett's fantasy novel, complete with puppetry and pulse-pounding music, is about two teens thrown together by a tsunami in 1804. The half-naked innocents find love on the way to building a nation.
"Nation" screens at 1 p.m. Sunday and 7 p.m. Tuesday as part of the Loft's High Art in Hi Def series. $15.
