Plays by Neil Simon are often maligned because amateurs regard them as invulnerable fortresses of entertainment value, resulting in some dreadful versions of fundamentally solid plays. Also, many of the scripts are merely brilliantly hysterical, teaching us nothing about our world or the human condition. But not even that is…
To prepare for a summer spent feeling as though you’re wasting your life, there’s nothing like seeing a play about people who spend the summer feeling as though they’re wasting their lives: Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. If you’ve always thought of it as a feel-good romp — who doesn’t like…
The setup: For many of us late Boomers of the Valley, La Cage aux Folles was the first foreign film we got to go see all by ourselves as young adults, setting a standard for both comedy and the mainstreaming of gay cinema that’s been hard to match since. See…
Hate musical theater? Check out Theater Works’ The Musical of Musicals (The Musical!), which heaps ridicule on Rodgers, Hammerstein, Sondheim, Fosse, Lloyd Webber, and other dinosaurs, uh, we mean innovators of the form. Writers Joanne Bogart and Eric Rockwell take the basic story of two young lovers, an evil landlord,…
Though Aspen and Santa Fe are okay places to visit if you have to, we’re pretty stoked to be on the limited tour schedule of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, fresh from its Moscow debut earlier this month. The company’s danced at Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival…
The setup: A few years back, playwright Jordan Harrison was approached by Anne Kaufmann of The Civilians, NYC’s “investigative theater” troupe, who’d become fascinated with intentional communities such as Hasidic Jews, nuns, and the Amish, bearing transcripts of interviews and a request to let the concept marinate and come up…
Reeling from life’s complexity, we ponder our place in time. Should more than just our coffee table be vintage? In Jordan Harrison’s Maple and Vine, a burnt-out Manhattan couple gets a chance to find out in the Society of Dynamic Obsolescence, a band of re-enactors that’s created a town way…
Normally, this time of year, our theater pants would be full of PHX:fringe performances, but we’re having a much less edgy spring than we’d like. The festival’s official website, which went dark in January or February, had featured the same landing page for several months, advising fans to check back…
You think there’s nothing special about Jim Belushi and the Chicago Board of Comedy bringing their brand of non-stand-up comedy to Stand Up Live? Really? Meet me on camera three.The funniest people we’ve ever seen were Chi-town comics and actors who weren’t even out of school yet. Cheering the Cubs…
Life’s perfect moments sometimes announce themselves in small and subtle ways. If you’re an underpaid, middle-aged waitress, like the heroine of Terrence McNally’s play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, winding up in bed with a co-worker in your crappy little Hell’s Kitchen walk-up might feel like the…
Thanks to people who give me Christmas presents, I got to indulge my huge irrational Chris Kattan crush last weekend, admiring his sweet smile, sexy bod, warm brown eyes, and dormant career from a mere 30 feet away. A true fan knows that Kattan’s strongest mainstream film performance (except for…
The setup: Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore are successful TV writers from New Jersey (if you ever wonder who’s married to Adrienne Barbeau, it’s Van Zandt) who also create mainstream farces (Love, Sex, and the I.R.S.). The team’s Wrong Window! takes the overall plot of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (28th…
The setup: Stray Cat Theatre produced two other scripts by Stephen Karam, directed by Ron May, a few seasons back, and the currently running Sons of the Prophet is the third such matchup. This is a classic example of a play that people tend not to have heard of (despite…
Is “I am not an animal!” what most of us remember about Victorian Englishman Joseph Merrick, a.k.a. the Elephant Man? Or the myth that Michael Jackson tried to buy his skeleton? In any case, 1980’s film, starring John Hurt, followed Bernard Pomerance’s play, The Elephant Man, a work of enduring…
The plot of Il Trovatore is enough to get almost anyone to go to the opera. Without giving too much away, there’s true love, vengeance, mistaken identity, bitter irony, suicide, Gypsies, swordfights, and the famous “Anvil Chorus,” which sounds like . . . oh, Google it. And one of the…
The setup: Doing anything artistic in the Valley for five straight (as it were) years is a huge accomplishment. A sketch comedy troupe that’s been performing several times a year in a dump on Grand Avenue, beginning in 2008 when the economy tanked? Hella impressive. Guess what else? They’re smart,…
The setup: Dale Wasserman, who lived and worked in Paradise Valley from 1992 until his death in 2008, was one of the old school of stage and screen scribes who ran off as a youth from a boring small town and made his bones in the golden age of TV…
If you’re Sigmund Freud, it’s only fair (if not mandatory) that writers speculate about the depths of your psyche. You can’t swing a cat without hitting a play about yourself. The latest is Arizona Theatre Company’s production of Freud’s Last Session, dramatizing an imagined 1939 meeting between scholar (and Narnia…
We’ve sort of asked Class 6 Theatre why it’s called that, but we remain in the dark. Most likely, it’s not named after a Norwegian train (this bird has perused timetables and chosen a convenient departure time). We hope it has to do with the not-yet-approved-for-use Category 6 on the…
Chow Bella has a valentine for you. For the rest of February, we’re handing out Candy Hearts — stories of food and love from some of our favorite writers. Enjoy. In a decent childhood, someone feeds you routinely, from the very first day. How can there not be at least…
Close counts in more than just horseshoes and hand grenades. Being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama counts big time — the nominating committee chooses as few as three scripts per year and ranges farther than Broadway in search of the best American play.So plays don’t get much…
The setup: There’s a lot of backstory here. Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre went out of business last year, and a venerable, family-friendly Salt Lake City (well, Murray) company, Desert Star Playhouse, took over the cavernous space at Brown and Higley roads to launch a metro Phoenix branch of their silly,…
