Thursday 22
ROLLING THROUGH TURKEY DAY. Work off that turkey before you even eat it.
Full Cycle invites you to a Thanksgiving Day ride and dinner. Join the group for a ride of moderate intensity and distance, followed an hour or so later by a family-style turkey dinner (vegetarian option) at Mountain View Restaurant, at Mountain Avenue and Prince Road.
The ride starts at 9 a.m. at Full Cycle on Speedway.
Dinner starts at 1:30 p.m. and you can even bring your bike inside the restaurant.
Total cost for this unusual observance is $20 and includes a limited-production Cyclists' Thanksgiving 2001 T-shirt. The event is limited to 50 prepaid riders-diners. Sign up at any Full Cycle Shop. For more information, call Allison Duncan at Full Cycle Speedway, 327-3232.
Friday 23
FRY BREAD DEAD AHEAD. Great food, the cutest little kids' contest you've ever seen and lots of Christmas finds await you at Rillito Raceway this weekend.
The Native American Indian Heritage Month Social Pow Wow and Craft Market features participants from over 50 tribes.
Visitors will find authentic Indian arts and crafts booths, traditional Indian foods, children's activities in a full-size tipi, an Indian baby contest, traditional songs and dances and a song-drum contest.
The event takes place at Rillito Raceway Park, from 4 to 10 p.m. Friday, noon to 10 p.m. Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. Admission costs $5 plus a new, unwrapped toy. For more information, call 622-4900.
Saturday 24
A BIT MORE THAN FAIR. When it opened in 1956, starring the then-unknown Julie Andrews as Eliza, My Fair Lady won the New York Drama Critics award for outstanding musical of the year and ran for an unprecedented 2,717 performances on Broadway.
Lerner and Loewe's beloved musical masterpiece, truly the queen of all romantic musicals, will get the royal treatment as Arizona Theatre Company, celebrating its 35th season, opens a run with a stylish new production.
Gorgeous sets, scores of exquisite costumes and delicious performances from some of the country's top musical-theater talents--including some familiar ATC favorites--add up to an unforgettable treat for the whole family to enjoy.
The play is based on George Bernard Shaw's comic masterpiece Pygmalion, which itself was drawn from the Greek myth about a sculptor who fell in love with his ivory statue of a woman.
In My Fair Lady, linguistics professor Henry Higgins plucks Cockney flower peddler Eliza Doolittle off the street on a bet that with six weeks of lessons in speech and manners he can pass her off as a duchess at the Embassy Ball.
When he makes the shocking discovery that his creation has a heart, and that perhaps he does, too, the experiment takes on unexpected, more complicated dimensions.
Norman Large, last seen at ATC as Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore, will play Higgins. Large's Broadway credits include Les Miserables (original cast), A Doll's Life and Silverlake. He has appeared in Los Angeles in Phantom of the Opera, Cats and South Pacific.
Kate Fisher will play Eliza. Fisher has most prominently been seen as Cosette in Les Miserables on Broadway, and as Carlotta in the Yeston/Kopit production of Phantom of the Opera. She comes directly from the world premiere of the "new" Gershwin musical They All Laughed at the Goodspeed Opera House.
The ensemble includes Tucson resident David Alexander Johnston, who sang with Arizona Opera last season in Barber of Seville, Carmen and Girl of the Golden West.
My Fair Lady, directed by ATC artistic director David Ira Goldstein, previews at 8 tonight and runs through December 15 at the Temple of Music and Art. Tickets range from $30 to $42 and are available at www.arizonatheatre.org or by calling the ATC box office at 622-2823. Discounts are available for students, seniors and the military, and anyone under 25 may purchase tickets for $10.
HO! HO! HO! It's Christmas Eve, 1860, and the wagon train has stopped at Hidden Valley.
Little Hannah isn't happy, though. She's worried her letter to Santa won't make it in time. She brightens when she learns that this Christmas all letters to the big guy are being delivered by none other than Little Cody of the Pony Express.
The Crystal Palace Players carry on their "all-singing, all-dancing" tradition with plenty of upbeat holiday numbers in Westward Ho! Ho! Ho!
Take the family to Hidden Valley Inn for a cowboy Christmas roundup this year.
The show opens at 7 tonight and runs through December 24 at Hidden Valley. Dinner is served beginning at 5:50. Show admission costs $13.95 adults, $8.95 children 12 and under. Dinner entrées start at $7.95 and the kids eat on the cheap with a special low-priced menu. For reservations, call 299-4941.
Sunday 25
ORGAN-IC BEAUTY. Get into the spirit of the holidays with a bit of heavenly music.
Music of the Spirit, the second event in the Roy A. Johnson Memorial Organ Series, features David Gay, a former organist at St. Andrew's Church and currently a UA math professor.
Gay's program includes suites. Two of them are based on hymn tunes, while the third is based on ancient chants, and the fourth is a set of tone poems inspired by verses from Psalms and Isaiah.
The program, which reaffirms the spirit of Thanksgiving and looks forward to the Advent season, includes Johann Sebastian Bach's Chorale Partita; Four Biblical Settings by American composer Emma Lou Diemer; Chorale Partita by American composer Milton Gill; and Three Gregorian Paraphrases by 20th-century French composer Jean Langlais.
The concert starts at 2:30 p.m. today at Holsclaw Recital Hall, in the UA music building, at the south end of the pedestrian underpass on Speedway Boulevard east of Park Avenue. Tickets cost $10 general, $8 UA employee and seniors, and $4 students. Tickets are available through the UA Fine Arts box office, 621-1162. For more information, visit www.arts.arizona.edu/music.
PULLING SOME STRINGS. It's getting pretty chile in puppet land.
New Kiva Motions Puppet Theatre presents Hot Chiles, a show that includes the Spanish-English chile rap, interviews with the chile on the street, and the true story of Jeff Milton and the Water Coolers.
After the show kids get some up-close and personal action with the puppets, and then the audience members get a chance to make a simple puppet to take home with them.
Hot Chiles is perfect entertainment for kids 5 to 12. The show starts at 1:30 p.m. today at the Red Barn, 948 N. Main Ave. Tickets cost $3 per person, $5 for 2 children and $2 for those with an AHCCCS card or low income bus pass. For more information, call 887-5144.
Monday 26
DYNAMIC DUO. A pair of very well-traveled musicians takes the stage tonight for a concert sure to ease your troubled mind.
Even if your mind isn't troubled, cellist Nancy Green and pianist Tannis Gibson probably will make you feel better nonetheless.
Joining forces for a UA Faculty Artist Series concert, Green and Gibson will present the Sicilienne from Pièces en Concert by Couperin; Elégie by Faure; Sonata in A major by Beethoven; the sonata of Kodály; and Variations on a Rococo Theme by Tchaikovsky.
Green, who joined the UA faculty in 1995, has performed extensively on the concert stage as well as for radio and television in the United States, Europe and the Far East. A native of Boston, Green studied at the Juilliard School.
Gibson, assistant professor of piano at the University of Arizona, is a graduate of Juilliard where she was a scholarship student. Gibson has appeared in concert throughout the United States and Canada as well as in France, Belgium, Spain and, more recently, China.
The concert starts at 7:30 tonight in Crowder Hall, in the UA music building. Tickets cost $10 general, $8 UA employees and seniors, and $4 students Tickets are available through the UA Fine Arts box office, 621-1162.
Tuesday 27
INSTITUTIONAL JAZZ? Guitarist Dom Minasi has been all about music since he was a teen.
Born in 1943, Minasi had been a professional musician from the age of 15, backing vocalists with his trio and teaching prolifically.
"By the time I was 19 or 20, I had more than 100 students, but I cut it down to 95 so I could play six nights a week," said Minasi, who will join New York free-jazz saxophonist Blaise Siwula tonight for a Tucson performance.
When Siwula, a Detroit native, came to New York in 1989, he was already a veteran of the free jazz movement, but his activity in the last 12 years has been astounding both in its quantity and diversity.
He's been actively involved with downtown New York performance spaces, including Amica Bunker and The Improviser's Collective. He's performed with such luminaries as Cecil Taylor, Perry Robinson, William Hooker, Mark Whitecage, William Parker, classical composer Tan Dun and Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Renaldo.
Fortunately for Siwula, just as he was getting established in New York, Minasi was starting to reactivate his musical career.
And how good is Minasi?
Derek Taylor of All About Jazz says Minasi "works his frets like a man possessed with an unsettling case of inertial dementia, peeling off tangled lines in steady metallic cascades."
With this show, Zeitgeist continues its fifth season in the Jazz at the Institute series, devoted to showcasing the best of improvising artists who are pushing the bounds of jazz.
Complementing the music will be the unique sculptural creations and lighting of performance artist Mat Bevel.
The Siwula-Minasi Duo performs at 8 tonight at the Mat Bevel Institute, 530 N. Stone Ave., just north of Sixth Street. Tickets cost $10 at the door. Advance tickets cost $8 at CD Depot, 1712 E. Speedway Blvd., and Antigone Books, 411 N. Fourth Ave. For more information, call 882-7154.
LIGHT MOMENTS. For photographer Christopher Burkett, capturing yellow-tinged lily pads on a blue mill pond can take two weeks.
At other times, a flash of insight mingled with a special moment of light under a dark sky means a single shot for a once-in-a-lifetime photograph.
Burkett's American Tapestry, photographer Dick Arentz's Photographs from the British Isles and painter Nancy Tokar Miller's Poetics of Place all are on display starting today at Etherton Gallery.
Arentz shoots with a 12-by-20 antique "banquet" camera and a 7-by-17 view camera to produce platinum-palladium prints. His latest efforts are focused on the beauty of the British Isles.
Miller's paintings are luminous abstractions, evocative of landscape and the "objectness" of things natural and concrete. Imagery is influenced by trips to Japan, Thailand, Tahiti, Hawaii, the Cayman Islands, Spain, Bali and the ruins of Tulum and Coba in the Yucatan.
See the works of these accomplished artists at Etherton, 135 S. Sixth Ave., through January 26. A reception is planned for 7 to 10 p.m. December 1. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays (until 7 p.m. on Thursdays). For more information, call 624-7370.
Wednesday 28
FINE YOUNG CLASSICS. "They sound like they belong together."
The Chicago String Quartet, founded in 1995 as quartet in residence at DePaul University, received such words of praise from Chicago Tribune music critic John von Rhein just one year later.
The group, which first visited Tucson in 1998 for the fifth Winter Chamber Music Festival, has established itself as a premiere ensemble, garnering the praises of critics and audiences alike.
The Chicago String Quartet returns this evening for the fourth concert of the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music's 54th season.
Tonight's performance includes music by composers Ludwig van Beethoven, Ellen Taffe Zwilich and Antonin Dvorák.
Curtain rises at 8 p.m. in the Leo Rich Theater at the Tucson Convention Center, 260 S. Church Ave. General admission tickets cost $15; student tickets cost $5. For tickets and more information, call 577-3769 or visit www.arizonachambermusic.com.
