If Theatre Artists Studio chooses to produce a play, you know it’s a project that talented, experienced people are very passionate about. Honor and respect for the material also come standard. So although The Studio’s partially staged concert version of the evergreen, Tony-winning Cabaret won’t be as flashy or atmospheric…

The best we can say about Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber is that when he writes about real people (rather than, say, cats, rollerskating choo-choo trains, or creepy fictional guys who live under opera houses), he creates quite moving musical theater scores. And despite accusations that Evita contains historical inaccuracies about…

It’s been 50 years since 1963’s March on Washington (itself timed to the Emancipation Proclamation’s centennial) featuring Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Over the next five years, President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. King would be assassinated. Hundreds more were murdered. Heights of…

Childsplay’s stage version of The Velveteen Rabbit, celebrating its 25th anniversary through Sunday, December 22, is for ages 3 and older, so the 1922 story’s weighty issues like love and loss in this life and a higher plane of existence in the next won’t be obvious downers. Maybe not even…

Of the many variations of the legend of The Flying Dutchman, composer Richard Wagner focused on the part where the ghost ship’s doomed captain can be released from his perpetual wandering by the love of a truly faithful woman. (We saw Florence Henderson accomplish this feat on Fantasy Island once.)…

The residents of Tokyo are locked in an epic battle with giant jungle crows. Sounds like a great monster movie — but it’s a documentary, Tokyo Waka, presented at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art by No Festival Required Independent Cinema. It’s a poetic, contemplative film that weaves a philosophical framework…

Unless you saw the 1988 film version of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels within the past week, it’s hard to tell who’s conning whom in the intricate, goofy, romantic plot that translates splendidly to the musical stage. Multiple Valley troupes have chosen this season to present the 2005 Broadway success, and, through…

Now that Brelby Theatre Company’s in its official venue, the troupe’s wasted no time scheduling not just a mainstage season but a Studio Series of new, relatively obscure plays. Through Saturday, November 16, it’s Prodigy, about a musician’s conflicting loyalties. Indiana-based actor/playwright Ben Abbott, whose Questions of the Heart: Gay…

Stymied by your entertainment choices? Try the Pulitzer Prize yardstick — there’s just one per year for drama (sometimes none). If the script subsequently wins a Best Picture Oscar, you’re looking at the kind of odds you get with Driving Miss Daisy, at Scottsdale Desert Stages Theatre through Sunday, January…

Superman wasn’t the first fictional character to die and come back. Holmes did it, homes. When fans demanded more stories, savvy Arthur Conan Doyle figured out how no-shit-Sherlock could escape his fatal predicament and return, as he did in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” superpowers or no. Even after…

When Actors Theatre’s financial challenges pre-empted its season last winter, the arts community was discouraged indeed. But the troupe’s swimming on with a return to regular production: A Steady Rain, a take on the buddy-cop genre in which, in the words of AT’s own publicity, one of the partners is…

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, subtitled A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, is surprisingly full of not just witty bons mots (“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train”) but also awful groaners that are all the funnier because…