The Odd Couple premièred on Broadway in 1965. By now, entire generations haven’t even seen Felix and Oscar quibbling in TVland reruns of the ensuing sitcom. (Not to mention The New Odd Couple, starring Lamont Sanford and Detective Ron Harris, or The Oddball Couple cartoon about dog and cat roommates.)…
Sure, Phoenix overflows with our own distinctive arts, entertainment, and culture, plus world-class visiting events and attractions, but these warmer months are . . . different. The wild rumpus heads indoors. More happenings shift to after-dark timeframes. We prefer our fun wetter and/or less fully clothed. Winter visitors, bless them,…
There are more challenges to having five robots on stage in a production of Elizabeth Meriwether’s Heddatron than you might initially think. For a lot of theater people, the most obvious and common issue is affording five robot actors and finding someone who will provide you with them. Then there’s…
Provided you aren’t stuck in summer school, now’s primo young-adult-fiction-reading time. Not all of prolific author Alyson Noël’s hot-selling books include elements of the paranormal, but her new “Soul Seeker” series, like The Immortals novels, has a ton of otherworldly and magical stuff going on. (Also a guy with weird…
The simplest things are the most difficult. When your options are limited, when there are only so many choices to make, one misstep is a glaring note of dissonance. Little mistakes are comparatively easy to hide in an epic extravaganza. In something like a plain roast chicken or an ikebana…
If there’s a more devoted fan or better-informed expert on spunky girl detective Nancy Drew than spunky girl attorney Jennifer Fisher, it only stands to reason that Fisher would have found that person by now. Fisher’s taken her magnifying glass and flashlight to all the books in the series, helmed…
The celebrity of tatted-up rockstar-style cat behaviorist Jackson Galaxy, who hosts Animal Planet’s My Cat from Hell (with new episodes premièring June 30), has helped make it possible to be perceived as a hipster and a crazy cat person, and for that, the rest of us crazy cat people are…
At first, I wasn’t sure that Th [sic] Sense: No Class! has any sort of seasonal theme (not that I need my sketch comedy compilation shows to have a theme of any kind). But I couldn’t discern anything about the weather being crappy or school being out (or bad blockbuster…
Arizona’s hardest-working female playwrights prepare scripts for Arizona Women’s Theatre Company’s annual Pandora Festival of New Works, named for the Greek version of the very first woman, who, when she opened her, uh, box, released all the bad things to fly out into our world — except for Hope, which…
A lot of experimental theater is quite sociopolitical in its messages, be they overt or subtle. Chris Danowski, whose plays are mostly on the not-your-father’s-Oldsmobile side, has indeed written plays like that, which are critical and thought-provoking, while still funny and entertaining (FrogWoman, for instance, which despite everything is the…
La Cage aux Folles, the drag-infused musical comedy about actual family values, leads a charmed life: The 1973 French play that became the 1978 French-Italian international hit film, and was reworked into Broadway’s Best Musical of 1983, took the Best Revival Tony in 2004 and again in 2010. Armed with…
Acclaimed author Ann Patchett loves her comfy home and indie bookshop in her native Nashville. But she loves readers, too, so she’s road-tripping to chat about and sign State of Wonder, her 2011 novel about a pharma researcher’s perilous search for a fellow scientist who disappeared in the Amazon on…
I know I’ve lost an arm-wrestling match with a classic piece of literature if I can easily follow a story from beginning to end and don’t feel confused, yet just can’t shake that feeling of not knowing what the big effing deal was. But you know you’ve been lucky enough…
Painter Mark Rothko was opinionated, annoying, and perhaps a little nuts. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) People have allegedly wept upon viewing his big canvases of blurry, floating rectangles of color (dubbed “multiforms” by critics) and still pay tens of millions for them. John Logan, who also scripted…
Downtown’s up-and-coming Orange Theatre Group is bringing back the kind of obtusely symbolic, performance-arty happening that makes people riot in the streets. (Which is great, because we could honestly use a different reason to wave signs and holler at one another.) Their PHX:fringe performance in March featured a toilet, cheesy…
It’s a piece of cake for the organizers of the 11th Annual Phoenix Improv Festival to pack a lot into a little — that’s kind of a holy principle of comedy. So yes, the entire event fests your ass off between now and Sunday afternoon, April 29, and it doesn’t…
Oy, where to start? Well, first, for the sake of clarity, Soul Invictus’ The Golden Gays is not presented by our beloved AZ Gender Outlaws — so, for example, it’s neither the same show nor the same performers as this word-for-word drag re-enactment of an episode of The Golden Girls…
Subject matter isn’t one of the generally accepted elements of drama (such as plot, character, theme, and dialogue) that we’ve ticked off on our fingers since classical times — maybe because every play has it, and excellence doesn’t really depend on exactly what it is. But it is an attribute…
Sad face! We missed ASU’s biannual Ceram-A-Rama in January, a four-day progressive gala and fundraiser that, for aficionados of 20th-century and contemporary ceramic art, is the equivalent of a party bus to Burning Man, Model U.N., Storage Wars, and a Vegas buffet. But we’ll be consoled by the Ceramics Research…
Like any celebrity, Food Network chef Giada De Laurentiis gets grief for being who she is: the granddaughter of a legendary film director (not her fault — she has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and doesn’t even like being in front of a camera) and a genuine Italian person (which…
If renowned mushroom-picking, multidisciplinary avant-garde composer John Cage were still alive, he’d be 100 this year. If his spirit was reincarnated in another being after his death, that being turns 20 this year. It’s more straightforward to commemorate the former, so that’s what performance collective 7 Ate 9 is doing…
Some jukebox musicals try to wrap an invented storyline around an oeuvre of pop hits, but Dream a Little Dream doesn’t have to resort to that, because the events of The Mamas and the Papas’ years in the limelight are dramatic enough for anybody. Papa Denny Doherty co-wrote the script…
