The setup: Ken Ludwig, great American farceur, has penned such solidly wild comedies as I Hate Hamlet, Lend Me a Tenor, Moon over Buffalo, and the mystifyingly underproduced Leading Ladies. Since all those plays are about show-business people (mostly actors), I was curious to see what Ludwig did with the…
“Multidisciplinary” probably wasn’t coined to describe enjoying cocktails and buff acrobats while getting our highbrow culture on, but we’re running with it now. Museum programmers realize that if you expose people to something fun while introducing something new, they might come back for that second thing. Sounds like our dating…
The setup: Next to Normal marks the first time since Rent that a musical won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. (Interestingly, composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey had written even less for the stage than had Jonathan Larson at that point.) Arizona Theatre Company mounted a production last fall,…
Ideally, when a play’s scary, it’s for the audience and on purpose. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of Sunset Boulevard is scary for producers. Apparently, it’s not enough that the design concept was prohibitively complex and costly for even the original West End, L.A., and New York productions; there’s also…
Ubu Roi (which basically translates as “King Turd”) is one of the weirdest, grossest, funniest French plays of all the famously weird, gross, funny French plays. (Which is a lot, because France’s playwrights were especially active in the vanguards of Dada, absurdist, and surrealist drama.)Showing what happens to people when…
World premières are uncommon in our theater community. Sometimes, in fact, it’s sufficiently exciting if the same 6-year-old play isn’t presented in multiple venues on the same evening. But not only do we have a world première right now — Love Makes the World Go ’Round, through Sunday, February 17,…
Plastic bottles don’t pollute the environment; people pollute the environment. So it makes perfect sense to us that a cute little plastic bottle named Sam is the heroine of Space 55’s Of Plastic Things and Butterfly Wings, a show for kids and families that includes musical instruments and puppets made…
The setup: Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps is a breakneck farce that doesn’t exactly parody the classic film and spy novel that inspired it — it’s more of a concept that makes fun of them as they are, taking every element that’s a little weird or over-obvious or supremely early-20th-century…
Except for the clearly understandable part where sometimes people give them lots of tax-exempt money, the thought processes of late Scientology founder Lafayette Ronald “L. Ron” Hubbard and the folks now entrusted with administering his legacy of what’s legally defined as intellectual property are best not over-analyzed. Like deities themselves,…
We had to begin our first 2013 conversation with comic singer/songwriter Scott Gesser by following up on his New Year’s resolution for 2012. So did he, as he vowed from Soul Invictus’ stage in November 2011, get more pussy in the new year? “Probably about the same amount,” Gesser tells…
Comedian PJ Walsh has beaucoup life experience on which to draw, starting with his Irish-American upbringing and followed by his enlistment in the U.S. Navy at 18 years old in 1990, when he figured there was no chance of war anywhere on the horizon. (Oops.) Upon his safe return from…
The setup: Though I’m sure Jane Austen has plenty of male fans as well, let’s just say that young women who originally thrilled to the 1995 films and miniseries Clueless, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility (and lingered on through Bridget Jones’ Diary) now have teenage daughters who’ll…
Nearly Naked Theatre’s been around. Though we expect the company to spotlight the new and provocative, some of the plays it presented as a wee baby troupe remain as disturbing as they were initially. One such, Equus, Peter Shaffer’s troubling drama of violence, madness, and passion, returns through Saturday, February…
Alfred Hitchcock did one sort of thing when he made a movie based on John Buchan’s 1915 spy novel, The 39 Steps. The 1935 film became an indelible classic action-mystery and, therefore, ripe for parody. So Patrick Barlow did a very different sort of thing when he created his Olivier-…
Astrologers, that notoriously meticulous and scientific group, are running about 2-1 in favor of concluding that the Age of Aquarius did begin in the 20th century. (The rest are still waiting for the 24th century, when none of us will still be here to prove them “wrong.”) But what you…
Ten years ago, Cirque du Soleil’s Normand Latourelle formed his own production, Cavalia, adding spirited equestrian performance to the foofy acrobat equation. This year, it’s Cavalia Odysseo, with a stage the size of 1.5 hockey rinks and an 80,000-gallon lake under a 10-story tent that has more technical capacity than…
Mere months before the BBC’s Colin Firth-adorned Pride and Prejudice and Ang Lee’s charming Sense and Sensibility launched an as-yet-unabated Jane Austen craze on our shores, there was 1995’s Clueless, which was, we learned, Austen’s Emma retold in contemporary Beverly Hills. Emma’s fabulosity is now a stage musical that gilds…
What we see on lawns lately falls mostly into the categories of decorated trees and shrubs, deflated Santas, and nativity scenes of varying authenticity and artistry. So the blue-and-white-striped circus tent next to Chandler Center for the Arts is sure to attract attention. It’s the site of Zoppé, an Italian…
As I write this, the year isn’t over. But I can say that, once again in 2012, I didn’t see a whole lot more than 10 plays I enjoyed so super-much I had to debate internally about putting them on this list. On the other hand, the ones that were…
UPDATE: The Thursday, December 20, performance of this show has been canceled. Performances resume Friday, December 21, at 7 p.m. (post-apocalyptic hellscape permitting). The setup: Bless their hearts, the founding directors of Brelby Theatre Company are still wrangling with getting their Historic Downtown Glendale studio all properly remodeled for public…
We have no idea what you’ll see at Space 55’s 7 Minutes Under the Mistletoe. But neither has Space 55. Somehow, though, the acts who’ve each arranged to perform for less time than it takes to bleach your teeth always step up their game to bring live art that is…
Most stories are either Oedipus Rex (Hamlet, The Graduate) or The Odyssey (The Wizard of Oz, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) underneath, and that knowledge renders required lit courses much more straightforward. There’s another pervasive seasonal influence, though: Even if a play isn’t technically called A Christmas Carol, chances are some grumpy…
