Maybe Hair and The Who’s Tommy set the bar way high, or else rock musicals are simply challenging — they didn’t really ignite as a genre on the live stage before Jonathan Larson’s 1996 Rent. Perfectly set on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as the 1980s blurred into the 1990s, featuring…
The setup: Great Arizona Puppet Theater, an outstanding cultural resource since 1983, is currently presenting a revival of one of its most popular original shows, The Princess, the Unicorn, and the Smelly Foot Troll. (Preschool audiences age out of shows within a few years, while another mini-generation has reached toddlerhood…
The setup: Peoria’s Theater Works is right in the middle of their first annual presentation of New Works, so we can’t complain there’s almost nothing to see this month. (Phoenix Theatre has moved its Hormel New Works Festival up to March for 2014, so we didn’t get to enjoy the…
David Lindsay-Abaire’s odd, hysterical plays are also trenchant enough to send you through a guardrail on the way home. Many have played here: Rabbit Hole, Fuddy Meers, Wonder of the World, Kimberly Akimbo. Lindsay-Abaire wrote the book and lyrics for Shrek the Musical as well. (Somebody had to.)Lindsay-Abaire’s 1997 A…
The setup: Many people who are or were cool enough to enjoy midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (in continuous release longer than any other motion picture) don’t know that it started out as an extremely popular stage musical in London. In the Valley alone, I’ve seen productions…
Author Chelsea Cain’s debut, Dharma Girl, was inspired by her early childhood on an Iowa commune. But her fascination with death and sleuthing also started early, as a young Cain followed the Green River Killer case in real time from her suburban Washington home, where she maintained a neighborhood pet…
When art exists for one day, it imitates life even more closely — the moment evaporates, and there’s no telling whether that will produce relief or regret. Such is the nature of new-play festivals like Maybe the Next Great Playwright Festival, a series of staged readings from Theatre Artists Studio…
Pamela Slim knows easy answers can be hard to find. The consultant and coach blogged about entrepreneurship for years before releasing her 2009 book, Escape from Cubicle Nation. Slim believes in teaching what people need to learn, so she her mentees complete a life plan long before start a business…
Arizona Theatre Company, the state’s largest producer of professional live stage work, ended its fiscal year June 30 with a $1 million deficit. In the wake of other Valley not-for-profit theaters having gone on hiatus or closed outright due to the recession, largely because of steep dropoffs in corporate giving,…
“I don’t act that much,” says playwright/journalist/professor/activist James Garcia, founder and artistic director of New Carpa Theater Company, “probably because I just don’t have time.” But Garcia’s made time to create and appear in New Carpa’s one-man show, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Culture Wars* (*But Were…
During the summer, between seeing musicals, drinking, and napping, we eagerly anticipate local theater companies’ announcements of their upcoming seasons. Shows to which performance rights have recently become available are politely competed for, actors look at their schedules and wonder what roles might suit them, and audiences keep their fingers…
You’ll want to remember where you were during Red Is the Night (ideally, at Red Is the Night), because it will long be talked of. Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton and his wife, Nicole Stanton’s kickoff fundraiser for Aunt Rita’s Foundation’s HIV education and outreach program, ProjectHIVAZ, is the first annual…
The setup: Whether you embrace or avoid contemporary musical theater, you’ve heard of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, he of the dancing, spandex-clad kittycats and singing choo-choo trains on roller skates, the man who (with the able assistance of iconic source material and talented collaborators) gave us the desire to have…
Old Testament Joseph’s interpretations of dreams could be troublesome. His 11 jealous brothers abandoned him, after which everything he touched basically went platinum. The flashy musical version of the story, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, was not only written by Jesus Christ Superstar’s Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber,…
A twist ending alone does not a masterpiece make, but if you shoehorn a couple of twists into one Herberger Lunch Time Theater show, you can enter your initials into the list of high scorers. (If there was one.) Class 6 Theatre’s current production, Afternoon Delight, showcasing one-act comedies from…
The setup: Agatha Christie may not have been the first mystery writer to maroon a bunch of strangers in a house together, tell them one of them is a murderer and some of the rest of them are potential victims, and then just let the secrets and paranoia do all…
In case you think that only American researchers are competing for the title of Professor Obvious, we’ve rustled up a study from the British Journal of Psychology, a beach read that’s stacked neatly, to the best of our knowledge, on thousands of insomniacs’ nightstands throughout the United Kingdom. What the…
Getting a PhD in English from Yale is not like eventually completing a stint in rehab. You don’t have to do it in order to remain insurable in the eyes of film producers who decide whether you can work on a project that involves paying hundreds of people pulling down…
Remember how — uh, we mean, remember reading about how powerhouse Zynga game Farmville made money based on, among other things, how often the players clicked, and how craftily designed it was to make you want to keep doing the same thing over and over for very little reward? (Three…
Tomorrow is Caplin Day, so today you’ll want to prepare to celebrate (get those blueberry yogurt bars into the freezer). Caplin Day is the birthdate of one of the United States’ most famous pet capybaras. It may be safe to say that the late, beloved Caplin Rous is the best-known…
Evolutionary psychology is a can of worms to begin with. If you want to find a particularly violent online argument, search out two people — one of whom believes mental and behavioral differences between men and women are entirely a social construct, and the other of whom thinks it’s possible…
By now, most of us have heard that if Mattel’s Barbie were a real person with the toy’s proportions, she wouldn’t just be clinically anorexic but, like a piece of badly rendered CGI animation, would succumb to the laws of physics and bend and snap (and not in the cool,…
