Best Improv Collective 2012 | Torch Theatre | People & Places | Phoenix
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Best Improv Collective

Torch Theatre

Local performers Bill Binder, Jose Gonzalez, Jacque Arend, Sam Haldiman, Nina Miller, Mack Duncan, Shane Shannon, and Tommy Schaeffer own and operate a theater collective they insist isn't theirs.

There's no one leader or decision-maker in Torch Theatre, which formed in 2007 when local performance troupes Apollo 12, Galapagos, Remainders, Mail Order Bride, Light Rail Pirates, Phoenix Neutrino Project, and Dangerville joined forces to perform on a regular basis, as well as offer classes and workshops.For Torch, the goal was always to find a home. And in 2011, they found a spot on Central Avenue, took out what was left of an old hair salon, added few coats of fresh paint, a stage and a curtain, and a few rows of chairs, and settled in.The Torch members since have seen countless performances, a number of graduation ceremonies, and a wedding. They've solidified a weekly schedule of performances and introduced new levels of instruction, and they organize the annual Phoenix Improv Festival. And now, they're waiting for you to come on board.

Best Community Theater

Black Theatre Troupe

Mere days before this venerable company throws open the doors on its brand-new downtown theater facility, we're happy to remind them and you that Black Theatre Troupe has been pleasing and enlightening local audiences for years.

This last season, we needed no reminding. A stunning production of Pearl Cleage's A Song for Coretta was followed by Bill Harris' Stories About the Old Days featuring Rod Ambrose and DeAngelus Grisby. Winding up with a new production of Ain't Nothin' but the Blues, BTT wowed us again, and this year's season promises to be just as engaging and features The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin. We can't wait, but the anticipation of what BTT has in store for us this year is almost as exciting as seeing the plays themselves.

Best Black Box

iTheatre Collaborative

Courtesy of iTheater
From iTheater's T Bone N Weasel (2013)

As if it weren't enough that this thought-provoking and well-tuned community troupe brought us a stunner in David Mamet's Race last winter, Christopher Haines and company also launched a unique series of drama workshops aimed at boosting the self-esteem of Arizona teenagers at a local homeless shelter. The iPlay curriculum, developed by Haines himself, since has taught dozens of at-risk teens about acting, improvisation, and performance. That, combined with a stunning season finale (up-and-coming dramatist Rajiv Joseph's Gruesome Playground Injuries) convinced us that good theater and good deeds deserve some kind of recognition.

Best Equity House

Actors Theatre

We almost lost them last year, and that would have been a shrieking nightmare from Hell. Because Actors Theatre has brought us decades of consistently high-quality professional theater from Stage West at the Herberger Theater Center. Just this past season, artistic director Matthew Weiner and company brought us Susan Claassen's dead-on impersonation of the famous Hollywood costume designer in A Conversation with Edith Head, followed quickly by Geoffrey Nauffts' Next Fall, and a staging of Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still that local theater fans were counting among the company's best productions, ever. So forgive us while we hoot and holler with joy that Actors Theatre was able to scrape together the financial means to stay with us for another year — and, hopefully, beyond.

Best Alternative Theater

Nearly Naked Theater

It's entirely possible that Damon Dering and David Weiss could have wound up somewhere other than Phoenix, in which case our city would be a lot less colorful, theater-wise. This trio of thespian talents has, for more than 10 years now, brought us a long list of avant-garde theater — camp musicals like Batboy! and top-shelf dramas like Spring Awakening. Upcoming productions include David Nehl's Great American Trailer Park Musical, which we know Dering and friends will make as memorable and thought-provoking as their many colorful past productions.

Best Educational Theater

Childsplay

If we love to take kids — ours and other people's — to Childsplay, it's not just because we know that Little Johnny and Little Janey will leave with a nice, tidy morals lesson, but because we'll have a good time there, as well. This 36-year-old professional theater company has long offered history and even math and grammar lessons (Schoolhouse Rock, anyone?), always folded into shows professionally presented by an amazing troupe that includes actors Jon Gentry, Debra K. Stevens, and the marvelous Katie McFadzen, and playwrights like Dwayne Hartford (author of The Imaginators and Rock the Presidents).

Best Puppet Theater

Great Arizona Puppet Theater

So, you're looking for a place to hold your kid's birthday party that won't also make you want to slit your own wrists before you get to the cake-cutting part. Ta-da! Time to consider Great Arizona Puppet Theater. Once you do, you'll discover why the word "great" appears in their title, because this neat nonprofit (in business since 1983!) thrills young audiences with old-timey entertainment that still delights. Ancient fairy tales get a once-over, as do twice-told Native American stories with morals about why it's great to live in the desert. The theater offers summer puppet classes for kids — one more reason to add them to your child's "to do" list!

Best Culture on Your Lunch Hour

Lunch Time Theater at the Herberger Theater Center

In the chilly, dark room at the back of this wonderful downtown building, in a space normally reserved for play rehearsals for Herberger residents Arizona Theater Company and Actors Theater, daytime magic sometimes happens. Lunch Time Theater is a going thing at 12:10 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays in the recently renamed Kax Stage. Showcasing the work of young, emerging theater companies, Lunch Time Theater offers up one-act plays lasting 30 to 45 minutes, to which daytime playgoers can bring a lunch or pre-order one from Lunch Time's own caterer. Tickets are a measly $6 apiece, not including lunch, and the short plays and musicals are top-notch stuff from seldom-seen, smaller local troupes. (Last season's schedule included work from the Improbable Theatre Company and popular Theatre Artists Studio.) Most shows offer an evening preview performance of each show on the Monday night of opening week, too.

Best Original Play by a Local Playwright

Dwayne Hartford's The Color of Stars

With his new play, The Color of Stars, Dwayne Hartford gave kids and grownups alike some fulfilling, provocative entertainment. With this emotional and vibrant drama, set in rural America during World War II, Hartford, the playwright in residence for Tempe's Childsplay theater, commented on our contemporary attitudes about wartime America with literate dialogue and sad, sometimes confused characters. Characters spoke of "Krauts" and "Japs" without tidy apologies tacked on by the playwright, who trusted that his audience, no matter its age, would find the morals lesson in an engaging story about loyalty and war and the love of a good family.

Best Actorly Homecoming

Kathy Fitzgerald in Gypsy

She used to be "ours," but then actress Kathy Fitzgerald left the Valley for New York and the Great White Way, and became — thanks to a long string of major successes including Wicked, 9 to 5, and the original company of a little thing called The Producers — "Broadway's Kathy Fitzgerald." Still, we were briefly able, earlier this year, to reclaim her when she came home to star in Phoenix Theatre's production of Gypsy. She played Mama Rose and, from the moment she made her entrance from the back of the house, carrying a Chihuahua and rasping a holler at her kids, took that old theater archetype — a woman whose made-up life was further rewritten in stories told by her daughter, Gypsy Rose Lee — and made her entirely real. Even if she weren't our hometown gal made good and a real-life Broadway star, it would have been impossible not to be knocked over by Kathy Fitzgerald's magnificent Mama Rose.

Best Of Phoenix®

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