For her masters of fine arts thesis show, ASU student Samantha Lyn Aasen presented one of the most exciting exhibitions of the year. Titled "Sparkle Baby," the mixed-media show featured photography and installations that assaulted the pretty pink princess cult of femininity that's marketed at young girls and women, who are expected to love glittery nonsense while also embodying perfection and oozing sex. Particularly amusing was her skewering of the vajazzling trend (you know, the one in which women glue rhinestones to their waxed vaginas). She crafted a display wall of options, including ones that spelled out "party girl," "brat," and "do me" in sad, shiny plastic.

When Natasha Duran-Lynch debuted her fashion line Hues of Ego at Phoenix Fashion Week 2014, it was met with all-out excitement. Perhaps more surprising: The enthusiasm was warranted. Though she looked like a frontrunner in the competition, she didn't end up winning the emerging designer of the year title. The Scottsdale-based designer made a memorable showing in white, black, and pink with dramatic, airy headpieces, sculpted gowns, and chic coats. She will return to Phoenix Fashion Week's emerging designer competition in 2015, and we have a feeling her second go-round will include a showstopper or two.

Carley Conder just might be the Valley's most recognizable dancer. It's an honor she's earned by working year-round on a slew of movement projects. Not only does the Tempe-based contemporary dancer and choreographer helm her own company, CONDER/dance, she also teaches dance at ASU and Scottsdale Community College, routinely performs original pieces at venues including ARTELPHX, and puts together the annual Breaking Ground festival, which features debut dance and film works from around the world. Our feet are tired just thinking about all the running around. But leave it to Conder to keep on moving.

We see very little from local playwrights, a rare breed whose work is usually relegated to workshop productions before being tucked away forever. Richard Warren is one among a very few exceptions. This year, a staged reading of Warren's Revocable Trust received a lot of attention. His adaptation of theater legend Dale Wasserman's memoirs, Burning in the Night: A Hobo's Song, was performed in two local playhouses. And at Theater Works in Peoria, Warren's Shifting Gears — a full rewrite of Pollywogs, a two-act Warren wrote back in 1999 — trod the boards in the black box McMillin Theater. The improved and retitled version received a pair of workshop productions at Phoenix Theatre, followed by a full production at Sedona's Canyon Moon Theater before Theater Works' executive director Daniel Schay, who directed the recent production, signed the play. The result was a small, talky story that ponL.dered a recent world in transition, circa 1961, and received generous reviews from every corner.

We attended a Desert Stages Theater production of Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues hoping to see pleasant performances and maybe grab a few laughs. Who knew a powerhouse performance by a principal player — a performance so thrilling that it completely overshadowed the production itself and its other leads — lay in wait? The stunning performance by Todd Michael Isaac, who turned the secondary role of Epstein into a sensation, was more than a little memorable. It began small, with a handful of casually delivered wisecracks that built into a bravura of confrontation and emotion. He hadn't been seen on stage since an equally superb portrayal in the same company's production of The Pillowman a few years ago, but this performance — tense, stylish, slightly unhinged — was worth the wait.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike won the 2013 Tony Award for Best Play, and its Arizona Theater Company production was a high point of this past season. Most memorably, this longish two-act about a trio of siblings, two of whom are living in their family home after caring for their deceased parents, was Isabell Monk O'Connor's wild performance. She whipped up a gleeful storm as a voodoo-enthused housekeeper, but her quieter moments — when she walked quickly through a scene, waggling a hat pin, or when she watched Charles Janasz's marvelous, nearly eight-minute-long tirade about the death of humankind — are moments we're still chuckling over.

When iTheatre Collaborative postponed its production of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark last year, it was because casting of the title role wasn't going well. Vera Stark is, like so many actresses who start out hungry and wind up legendary, alone on her own stage. Unlike a lot of leading-lady parts, she's also tough to play. She works alongside other actors only because she needs someone to talk to, but none — in her estimation, and in ours — are her equals. Vera is a fictional character, drawn from life by playwright Lynn Nottage. Nicole Belit, the woman who played her in the iTheatre production, was very real. Eyes pooling with tears, nostrils flaring, and with posture that suggests she'd swallowed a yardstick, Belit was dazzling. Her second act performance provided wider range and the opportunity to play drunkenness, anger, and an aged actress's scenery-chewing. But it's the Vera of Act One who stayed with us: wildly romantic, full of energy and singleness of purpose as she aspired to a grander existence.

Calling poor, hapless audience members up out of the crowd and humiliating them is too easy, a particularly low form of humor, gratuitous and frankly dreary, since the poor slobs hauled up on stage invariably have no talent for acting. On the other hand, there was recently the one-two punch of Ron May starring in Richard Bean's smart tribute to commedia dell'arte, One Man, Two Guvnors at Phoenix Theatre. This update of Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters slotted in an inordinate amount of chumming with the audience which — thanks to Pasha Yamotahari's slick direction and May's princely performance — turned out to be a ton of fun. May was called upon to tart up the also-ran responses shouted from the darkened house, and wowed audiences as ringmaster to a dazzling supporting cast that included stalwarts David Barker, Lucas Coatney, and Joseph Kremer.

Arizona Theatre Company's Romeo and Juliet turned out to be a treat, but only for those who hadn't already witnessed a previous parade of updated, restructured Shakespeare productions. And for those who didn't care whether the Bard's verses were well-delivered or his young hero and heroine nicely acted. Set in swinging '60s Italy, this overlong, largely dreary Romeo and Juliet was saved by ensemble player Richard Baird, who appeared to be the only actor cast for his ability to play Shakespeare. However he arrived on the production's makeshift Italianate stage, he owned it — particularly as a swaggering, ultra-butch Mercutio, whose Queen Mab speech he transformed into poetry. His performances here spared audiences from an otherwise dreary evening of theater.

Young playwright Eric Dufault's angst-drenched story is presented by a quartet of characters who demonstrate what happens when pain and longing spin out of control. What makes it different, then? It's nudged along by a talking bird who, as played by Austin Kiehle, was some kind of revelation. He proved an unusually wide range by playing a maniacal rooster, determined to murder the sun — apparently his true enemy — and everything under it. Furious and pumped up on a combo of steroids and Chicken McNuggets, he was a captivating capon, strutting jerkily, twitching and crowing violent diatribes, and making what might have been a production-sinking camp performance into something worth seeing.