Not unlike the police, one’s newborn children tend to arrive at the worst possible time — unless you want them, and then it can be almost impossible to get them to show up.It’s even more fraught in writer/comedian/educator/activist Monica Palacios’ play Clock, when you’re a couple of Latina lesbians and…
Just about every local theater jumped on Spamalot the moment it became available. You could follow it around as some of us used to with The Grateful Dead — or, in this case, Not Dead Fred. Inspired by Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the spectacular keeps the troupe’s benevolent…
The setup: 1949’s South Pacific, based on a few of the stories in James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, is Rodgers & Hammerstein’s third big show to completely change the face of the American musical (a genre that typically had made even less sense before). Instantly both a blockbuster…
This theater season’s been a riotous celebration of dysfunction, but we’re ready for some nurturing warmth. Some Joe DiPietro, whose soft-hearted comedies alternate with blockbuster musicals like Memphis and I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.As DiPietro told L.A.’s Daily News in 2000, “That’s kind of who my people are…
The Hormel Festival of New Plays and Musicals is back! (NOTE TO EDITOR: That’s all they need to know.)Well, we tried. Okay, HFONPAM, now scheduled for temperate March, returns to Phoenix Theatre. Readings, performances, and the manic 24-Hour Theatre Project comprise the 16th annual total-immersion “where do plays come from?”…
You look peckish. How about you sit down and let Lee Hillson, executive sous-chef at The Phoenician, fix you a nosh — maybe the pasta carbonara from his competition with Iron Chef Cat Cora, back when he was still at T. Cook’s? He’ll start us off gently, pulling some newborn…
The setup: Since 2014 began, it seems we theatergoers have faced down an awful lot of family dysfunction depicted on Valley stages — especially if you count The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth, which one probably should. You ought to hang in there for one more real masterpiece, though…
Lounging on your veranda in your velvet smoking jacket, choosing a diverting morsel of tuneful frivolity, it can’t hurt to check the composer. When you realize it’s Cole Porter, you might get so excited you drop your gin. Timeless songs like “Night and Day” endure better than many of the…
Even before Fifty Shades of Felt put Phoenix on the Christian-and-Ana parody map, we were a tour stop for a musical called Spank! that also enjoys the legal protection afforded spoofs. Now Cuff Me: The Fifty Shades of Grey Unauthorized Musical Parody struts its chafed, lightly bruised off-Broadway self into…
Despite wealth, fame, and success, the Wyeths’ chief concern at Christmas 2004 in Palm Springs is daughter Brooke’s upcoming memoir (her folks had hoped for a novel — oh, and Brooke’s fresh from what’s called a “mental breakdown”). The fictional family featured in Other Desert Cities isn’t the Reagans but…
Whether a video game’s for fun or medical rehab, whether a film is The Hangover or Shoah, such projects require artists. If they’re Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts students working toward Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Intermedia at ASU’s School of Art, they apply technique to road-less-traveled…
The setup: Not everything that takes the Manhattan theater scene by storm (besides the polar vortex) is a musical extravaganza or a heavy, thoughtful, or surreal drama. One of the hottest tickets right now is C. Denby Swanson’s The Norwegians, a fairly ridiculous short comedy that opened off-off-Broadway at The…
The setup: Nina Raine’s thought-provoking Tribes, about a typically troubled family whose deaf adult son, Billy, illuminates further hurt when he discovers the Deaf community he’s been denied, has been acclaimed since it premièred in London in 2010. Winner of New York’s 2012 Drama Desk Award for Best Play, the…
All Puppet Players, that Arizona-California troupe of low-budget lunatics, is most renowned right now for its embarrassingly popular world-première co-production (with Nearly Naked Theatre) of Fifty Shades of Felt, lauded by our competitors as not merely the filthiest puppet show in history but the filthiest play of any kind they’d…
In the late 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes collaborated on a script for a play, hoping to strike a balance between frothy musicals and drama with a Big Message — a tale celebrating the language and humor of genuine black America.The two friends encountered obstacles of logistics and…
Most of us don’t have a spare Benjamin or two nowadays to drop on a fundraising gala, even for those causes dear to our hearts, even if it’s deductible at the end of the year. Also, it’s usually no picnic (literally) to nosh on banquet food or stand around in…
The setup: Tracy Letts’ epic, relentlessly dismal yet moving and entertaining August: Osage County won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and came through Tempe on a national tour four years ago. Since then, Julia Roberts and Ewan McGregor have grown old enough to play middle-aged in the film version…
We kind of have Neil Simon to thank for Robert Redford, who would have become a giant movie star no matter what but really took off when he followed his long Broadway run in Simon’s Barefoot in the Park with a reprise of his role as uptight lawyer Paul Bratter…
Brelby Theatre Company specializes in cool yet nonreproducible experiences — plays you’re unlikely to have seen before or see again soon. Be a Good Little Widow, through Saturday, February 22, comes from prolific seriocomic writer Bekah Brunstetter (Switched at Birth), whose works touch on implied time travel, extreme natural phenomena,…
The setup: Mary’s Wedding is a contemporary play set during and just after World War I. This partially historic romance/dream/action adventure about a young Canadian couple has been the most widely produced play in Canada in the decade since its première…
Parents have to make choices constantly. For instance, let’s say you and your children are all super-intelligent and hyperverbal. You have one more child who’s just like the rest of you — except he’s deaf. In your world, with your experiences, you might choose not to have him learn sign…
Since 2004, Phoenician Ryan Avery’s done weird, artsy, generally loud things in public (except for two years he spent in Portland on a Mormon mission). He also creates visual art and recordings of not just his music projects but also performance art and stream-of-consciousness audio.These words don’t do justice to…
