If you don’t know anything else about the Tony-winning musical Dreamgirls, you’ve probably heard that song “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” When you contemplate Desert Foothills Theatre’s production, however, which closes Sunday, March 1, you might want to change the soundtrack in your head to “Maybe I…

Toaster pastries. Community college. Talking dog. Elizabeth is holding out for one nice ordinary day in Pluto, Steve Yockey’s play that’s presented by Stray Cat Theatre through Saturday, March 7. A radio speaks to Elizabeth directly, and the refrigerator’s moving: So much for normal. As it does in Yockey’s other…

To remain unspoiled by the ending of Foxcatcher, avoid the real-life story of chemical fortune heir and fanatical athletics booster John du Pont and the wrestling Schultz brothers. Why fanatical? Well, if somebody has a doctorate in natural science from Villanova and founded the Delaware Museum of Natural History single-handedly…

The Storyline returns to Space 55 with an evening that’s themed Don Quixote, featuring performances by Maureen Burris, Jean Hattie Hayes, Jules Hyde, Richie Molina, Joseph Redwood-Martinez, and Nate Romero. The true stories provoke laughter, tears, and peculiar flashes of recognition – so consider yourself warned. And with such a…

You’re getting old. You can’t figure out why the title of Gammage’s next big touring is Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage. Classic story? It only hit the screen in 1987. And this stage version was a white-hot comet of Catskills-coming-of-age in Australia, Canada, and London’s West End, but…

Each year, Black History Month celebrates many of the same civil rights leaders. Playwright Larissa Brewington’s out to change that, introducing “the stuff we don’t hear about.” Through Thursday, February 19, Herberger Lunch Time Theater presents Brewington’s March, highlighting women’s contributions to the sit-ins, protests, boycotts, and marches of the…

We find that stupidity flourishes, even without magic spells to help it along, but in Neil Simon’s Fools, the Ukraine village of Kulyenchikov has been chronically stupid for 200 years due to a curse. Can the curse be broken? New teacher Leon Tolchinsky is up for the challenge, largely because…

Arizona Theatre Company’s latest is a world première by Emmy-winning Rick Cleveland, who did a bunch of writing and producing for Six Feet Under and The West Wing. Cleveland’s new play, Five Presidents, imagines a conversation among U.S. presidents Clinton, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush before Richard Nixon’s…

Fiber artists Christy Puetz and Ingrid Restemayer have created weird, beautiful things to exhibit both together and separately since they studied in North Dakota more than 20 years ago. The duo’s current joint show, “Delicate Beasts,” continues through Saturday, February 14.Puetz sculpts life-size pets and small wildlife partially encased in…

Any play about the nuclear family enables plenty of inherent conflicts, but popular local playwright Richard Warren stacked the deck by setting Shifting Gears in 1961, when any two people anywhere, related or not, could find at least one world-class reason to disagree. From the sexual revolution to generational differences,…

We firmly hesitate to call any Valley event “Winterfest” unless it includes an artificially frozen puddle surrounded by trucked-in snowbanks. Nevertheless, it is technically hibernal outside, and Southwest Shakepeare’s Winterfest repertory programming at Mesa Arts Center, One East Main Street, goes heavy on the fest, so everything comes out even.This…

Jason Robert Brown, darling of musical theater geeks, premièred a show called 13 on Broadway in 2008. A musical cast entirely with adolescents would daunt many producers, but the bet paid off, the show’s been translated into several languages, and a film version is on the way. Peoria’s Theater Works…

Rapture, Blister, Burn is a lyric from a Hole song, and that helps explain why the play by the same title is not about a particularly ecstatic case of sunburn. It’s a funny and issue-driven play about young, 40ish, and elderly women and their choices, set in the world of…

There are not a whole lot of stories and plays for kids about nuclear weapons, and maybe there doesn’t need to be. A Thousand Cranes, however, is one of the best. It’s a play based on the true story of Sagako Sasaki, a girl who died of leukemia ten years…

“Why not do a remake with better-looking people?” is a trending topic on the Internet Movie Database’s Debbie Does Dallas discussion board. The question quickly devolves into a debate about shaving, but you’ll find contemporary cuties in Nearly Naked Theatre’s production of the musical version of Debbie. You’ll also find…

Once a month, Mesa Encore Theatre hosts a play reading. The top-notch cast and director put in rehearsal time so that the public can expand its own knowledge of the world’s theatrical literature. This month’s selection is Third by Wendy Wasserstein, best known for The Heidi Chronicles. The title refers…

UNIMA-USA is the U.S. branch of Union Internationale de la Marionnette, a puppetry network that is the world’s oldest theater organization. (This feels counterintuitive — because surely there were human beings before there were puppets — but let’s just live and let live. Or not live, really, if you’re a…

Performers know there’s a difference between Friday night and Saturday night audiences. The Fridayers are more, shall we say, desperate to relax and enjoy themselves. It makes sense, then, that The Torch Theatre presents The Trifecta on Friday evenings. Improv from three different entities in one crazy show makes up…

Professional theater companies have struggled fiscally the past several years, and one sign of that is all the plays with itty-bitty casts that they’ve been presenting. We sentimentally wish that more actors were getting paid, but until that happy day, we’ll enjoy the tours de force on display in Murder…

Some people assume that actors are good at lying in real life. Whether or not that’s so, you can tell an actor’s snowing you if he claims to have played the title role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Harvey. That’s because in the play, Harvey is an imaginary (or maybe…

Whether you’re not married but want to be, married but would rather not be, or content with life as it is (hey, it happens), there should be something to amuse you in the charmingly titled You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up! The anecdotal play by Emmy-winner Jeff Kahn and…