Energetic, experimental Orange Theatre emerges from a relatively quiet period to host an evening of unscripted fun Saturday, December 13, in its space at 1711 West Culver Street. First come drinks and snacks, mingling, and a preview screening of Inside Orange Theatre, a short documentary about the group by Goodman…

In case you’ve been living under a rock (hey, we’ve been there), you’ll be delighted to learn that the musical film version of Mary Poppins was adapted as a Tony-winning stage musical 10 years ago. It features most of the catchy songs that imprinted on your childhood brain — “A…

We understand that Eric Dufault’s Year of the Rooster is a play about chicken. Sign us up! We’ll chase it with a slow-roasted bird: garlic stuffed under the skin, a cut lemon inside, and . . . what’s that? It’s a play about a chicken? A gamecock. Oh. Well, that’s…

Wowie-wow-wow! Time for Childsplay’s recurring holiday presentation of Junie B. Jones in Jingle Bells, Batman Smells! If you are or were a kid (or close friends with one), you’ve probably read some of Barbara Park’s books about Junie. The stage version of JBBS delights both old or new fans: Mr…

If Black Theatre Troupe has shown us anything over the years, it’s that there are infinite ways of being black (or any other race) and that any black-white interaction is about race, even when the parties involved desperately wish that it weren’t. In the troupe’s current offering, Tommy J &…

Some folk tales have odd morals, like “don’t make a fairy angry.” Sound advice, to be sure, but not always applicable to everyday life. Other bedtime stories teach solid lessons about character and behavior, cloaking the serious platitudes in the adventures of cute little animals. Such is The Little Red…

English playwright Frederick Knott has received a special award from us: Guy Who Wrote the Most Familiar-Sounding Plays We’ve Never Actually Seen. One of them, Dial M for Murder, became a Hitchcock film and, based on Wikipedia’s plot description, is hella complicated — if anyone really did dial M, it…

We love to follow the development of new works by local playwrights, starting with workshopped readings and continuing through critiques and rewrites and . . . okay, we don’t always love it. We frequently crave a nice fully-mounted show: production values, design concepts, and a clutch of artistic egos in…

Claustrophobia and despair are no fun when it’s you experiencing them, but the claustrophobia and despair of Agnes White and Peter Evans are frequently a hoot in Tracy Letts’ play Bug, presented through Sunday, November 16, by Binary Theatre Company, the student production arm of the theater program at ASU…

Ironically, if the imaginary how-to book referenced in the title of the stage musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying were about show business, its words of advice might include “Give your show a title much shorter than How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Because most…

Writers are fun people (trust us), but we might be at our best one on one. In Theresa Rebeck’s play Seminar, five writers convene in a Manhattan apartment. One is renowned author Leonard, a teacher whom each of the others has paid $5000 to, no surprise, verbally abuse them for…

David Mamet’s written dozens of plays, making him a leading light of American theater in the ’80s (he’s slowed down a bit since). Those who remember him predominantly for his mastery of profanity, especially in Glengarry Glen Ross, are not off track — Mamet’s natural-sounding dialogue, including liberal cussing, is…

Actors Theatre embraces the leisurely, peripatetic nature of Phoenix summer with two comedies in rep: faux-British, faux-roaring-’20s farce The Cottage, opening Friday, June 27, and Karen Zacarias’ The Book Club Play, alternating with it through Sunday, August 17. Not just another way to use that cheese platter prop, Zacarias’ contemporary…

Yup, time to talk about Neil Simon again. After decades of comedies rendered anathema by bad amateur productions, the playwright created a series of autobiographical shows that are funny, less-overexposed tours de force. One of the best, part of what’s known as the Eugene trilogy, continues through Sunday, August 10,…

Fortunately, Herb Gardening for Beginners at Desert Botanical Garden doesn’t consist of us telling stories about episodes like that time Herb Gardening took us to see Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain. Instead, it’s a class that includes mystical, medicinal, and culinary lore of these tiny, intensely aromatic veggies that enhance…

Attention span. What? Oh — how about eight tiny plays by the up-and-coming playwright members of Scottsdale’s Theatre Artists Studio in the seventh year of “New Summer Shorts”? (Ours don’t get out enough to need replacing. Oops, another tangent.)The playlets’ subjects include the only time the three famous 19th-century American…

2000’s The Full Monty did well on Broadway, overshadowed by The Producers’ opening that season. The script, by lauded Terrence McNally (Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and the libretti of Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), joins 13 numbers by David Yazbek, who,…

Ordinarily, we’d be using this space to remind you to attend the opening of Nearly Naked Theatre’s Falsettos. Said opening has been postponed, however, and this weekend offers a once-in-a-lifetime event in its place: Nearly Naked Theatre’s Wonderful 100 Season 15 Celebration, a concert benefitting season 16 that’s a star-studded…

It’s time for summer field trips or, if you somehow wound up at home with your offspring, enriching activities for their edutainment and your sanity. Theater’s a good bet — kids groove on how it’s different from a movie in cool ways, and it often inspires binge-reading of actual books.Roald…