The Secret Garden, a musical inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Edwardian novel, features uptight Brits opening up like neglected flowers. Despite how pleasant that sounds, don’t show up at Arizona Broadway Theatre expecting a staging of Nancy Friday’s compilation of women’s sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden — you’ll be disappointed,…
Myriad versions of the 300-year-old ballad “Barbara Allen” have come down to us. Our dad sings that Ms. Allen’s suitor dies of lovesickness after her rejection. Guilt-ridden and lonely, she swiftly follows suit, and the plants that spring from their graves twine together forever. Awww.The 1942 play Dark of the…
The setup: Before sometime in the 1940s, American musical theater consisted of just a buttload of singing and dancing, reasons to look at women’s exposed legs, and no particular attempt at character or storytelling. During the Great Depression, movies were an affordable, diverting novelty, and the more implausibly cheerful and…
The setup: Many of the best off-Broadway theaters are clubs of a kind: like-minded artists who’ve come together to form a company that produces the kind of work they value, to joyfully challenge their skills, to share the results with audiences in a meaningful way. If you’ve spent years doing…
It’s sort of a given that if there’s a play called The Pornozombies, our twisted friends at Nearly Naked Theatre will get around to mounting it eventually. Refreshingly, Matt Casarino’s script is about pretty much what the title indicates: reanimated corpses who are extra-horny and wind up in sexay videos,…
New Times’ original hippie readers parented the supernumerous Millennials. Curiously, technology’s rendered the spawn hyperliterate, and the stories of Mom and Dad’s heyday are ripe for revival.Paul Zindel, who gained fame for young adult novels like the Pigman trilogy, was a playwright first. His biting 1967 And Miss Reardon Drinks…
The setup: If you’re fans of some of the Valley’s best theater artists, it’s both delightful and reassuring when they get particularly good jobs like a gig with Arizona Theatre Company, which is a nice bump in pay, visibility, and production values. Around the World in 80 Days is our…
Don’t be embarrassed that you’re unusually excited about Phoenix Art Museum’s “Hollywood Costume” exhibition. Take your cinematic apparel obsession all the way at PAM’s Hollywood Costume Party from 7 to 11 p.m. Friday, April 11. Dress as your favorite star or character, compete for prizes, and behave all red-carpety. As…
The setup: Madcap, whirlwind, and sexy, the farce is the perfect form of theater to revive the pants off of during recovery from an economic recession. As I recall, if you do it right, an illicit relationship can be one of the most affordable diversions (“We can’t go out; people…
Nation, a play for youth receiving its North American première from ASU Tempe’s MainStage, sounds not unlike The Blue Lagoon, but it’s based on the novel by Terry Pratchett (Discworld). That’s probably better, given Pratchett’s knighthood, 70 million books sold in three decades, etc. Mark Ravenhill (who also wrote the…
Living in the same town as Great Arizona Puppet Theater means we get to see acclaimed and unusual visiting puppet shows that the GAPTeers can snag due to their own decades of experience and connections. Coming up: Animalitos from The Magical Moonshine Theatre, a very musical company based in Vallejo,…
The setup: Three American cities have hosted “tryout” productions this season of National Pastime, a new musical with an interesting little history and a super-adorable, relatively plausible premise. Its creators continue to project optimism about its suitability for Broadway, or at least they did before it opened at Theater Works…
Mesa Encore Theatre announced last week that it will receive the 2014 Twink Lynch Organizational Achievement Award from the American Association of Community Theatre on Saturday, June 21, during AACTWorldFest in Venice, Florida. This is a pretty big deal. Though only a few Valley theaters are members of AACT, the…
If Arizona Theatre Company’s productions sometimes don’t feel Arizona-y enough, Around the World in 80 Days should balance that out. It features hyperlocal wunderalterkocker Jon Gentry as Passepartout, along with Valley-nurtured perennial fave Bob Sorenson and the talented and beautiful Kyle Sorrell (Xanadu) and Yolanda London, directed by Childsplay founder…
James Franco.Now that we have your attention (if not, what are you even doing here?), here goes: Franco stars with Catherine Keener in Maladies, about a young actor in 1960s New York who visits the oceanside home of a friend to process some instability (of the identity and behavioral variety)…
Classic farce: great fun for an audience but not so much for the characters, considering all the unintentional dishabille, mistaken identity, and frustrated efforts to engage in naughtiness. Don’t Dress for Dinner, presented by Scottsdale’s Desert Foothills Theater through Sunday, April 13, is a perfect example, called Pyjamas pour Six…
The setup: For The [SIC] Sense’s third show in its new home in the Basement Theatre at Phoenix Center for the Arts, the sketch comedy troupe takes a break from transitioning new cast members in and welcomes back Kristie Cowles, a one-woman ninja patrol of comic anarchy. About half of…
Glendale’s Brelby Theatre Company just won’t stop doing the Shakespeare. The young and frisky troupe focuses on the part of the canon that features young and frisky characters, and so far, so good. This time around, it’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, given a silent film/speakeasy kind of feel and a couple…
We’re gonna be sick. Not because we’re seeing The Sickie Bunch, the latest collection of sketch comedy from The [sic] Sense, but because the company’s restored the first “e” to its name, and ambiguous Latinate orthographic conventions make us hurl.The show features two short sets of live offensive music from…
In our groundhog-free city, the astronomically defined season of spring can still be rather delightful, even if the weather doesn’t feel that much different from autumn or even winter. Skies are blue, everything smells good (well, better than usual, anyway), and our typically understated vegetation is at its greenest, fluffiest…
The setup: Like Danny, the hero of his currently popular play The Submission, writer Jeff Talbott is a Yale Drama School grad who’s finished a handful of full-length scripts that haven’t really gone anywhere — until now. (Talbott does have a festival reading of his newest work, A Public Education,…
The setup: In her diverse 30+-year career, writer-comedian-educator-activist Monica Palacios, a.k.a. the Surfer Chola, has not written a whole lot of plays (though she’s helped others make hundreds of theater pieces) — she’s more of a lecturer, standup/solo performance artist, blogger, essayist, and magazine-style journalista making queer Latinahood something that’s…
