Every year, when days start to stay colder and darker for longer and longer, a little part of us goes ignorant caveman and wants to magic away the end of the world with a brilliant flame. Artificial light is comforting, practical, and very pretty, and the winter holiday season’s the…
There are other things to do this weekend besides shopping and decorating. In fact, it’s a great time to get out and see theater, between lots of locals being out of town and the rest of us maybe spending more time with our loved ones over a four-day period than…
We love our local authors, partly because they can’t skip us on tour. Outlander series scribe Diana Gabaldon joins fans for a buffet launch party in the Grand Ballroom of the Arizona Biltmore. Hot-off-the-presses The Scottish Prisoner — a crossover reunion of characters Jamie Fraser and Lord John Grey –…
your dinner table. A lot of people find Thanksgiving a super-family-oriented holiday. When I worked for a realtor’s answering service, there were fewer people calling to buy houses on Thanksgiving than on any other day, even Christmas. But at our house (maybe because there weren’t that many of us to…
Lately, it feels as though theater’s getting as insecure and vapid as some of the other arts: Everything has to be the first, the biggest, the funniest, the most shocking, or the most topical. Times are tough and competition is fierce, so I get that. But the door is now…
I like to think that after a night of being raunchy and transgressive, the sketch writer/performers of Th [sic] Sense troupe curl up by the fireside in Grammy’s old quilt with some hot cocoa and fluffy kittens to read old fairy tales. And it makes them feel naughty. Curtains has…
The Paradox of Choice isn’t just a geek-hot book by Barry Schwartz; it’s why decision-making hurts. So many terrific options, you can’t choose what to pass up — because of soul-crushing regret. So do you streamline your wardrobe, find a restaurant with two menu items, or embrace the glorious mess?…
Guy fed up with phonies and frivolity falls for cute, phony, frivolous gal. We’ve got so many of that T-shirt, we’re surprised Molière’s stage comedy The Misanthrope wasn’t about a musician from its 17th-century get-go. As it is, playwright Lauren Marshall painstakingly re-translated the French text several years back, preserving…
The topic of history makes a bad first impression on many of us, I think, because it’s taught from highly selective and seriously boring textbooks. News, often referred to as the rough draft of history, is skewed, reactive, and wearisome. Both formats focus too much on political intrigue and violent…
Okay, so it was on the Cracked website, but nevertheless, science is discovering that reason is as specious and arbitrary as anything else created by the human mind. It’s a set of rules we pulled out of our asses to be able to win arguments, because winning arguments is a…
“Oddly enough,” says Randy Murray, producer and co-director of Mitchell 20: Teacher Quality Is the Answer producer, “we’re blowing away the other films. A great example is — I think — a Tuesday afternoon; we had an audience of 80 at a screening, and 17 of the other theaters were…
“Oddly enough,” says Mitchell 20: Teacher Quality Is the Answer producer and co-director Randy Murray, “we’re blowing away the other films. A great example is — I think — a Tuesday afternoon; we had an audience of 80 at a screening, and 17 of the other theaters were completely empty,”…
A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity (friends’ bookcase and a head cold) to sit down and read John Irving’s Until I Find You — which should be more popular, given its “everything but bears” score on this grid. What happens to the book’s hero wound up happening to…
When we were around 13 or 15 years old, we frequently and solemnly swore that whatever else happened, we’d remember what it was like to be a kid. We knew adults who remembered and we knew those who apparently didn’t, and we’d sooner die than grow up to be the…
For people who aren’t on the Falsettoland train, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is probably the William Finn musical they’re familiar with. I love William Finn with all my heart — the very first Curtains blog was a wordy, gushing review of his A New Brain.The current Broadway…
It’s officially autumn, and you can feel it in the morning on a good day. But we still face a good month’s worth of weather worth complaining about, and a short, silly collection of irreverent sketches and songs from Th [sic] Sense is just the ticket. Soul Invictus’ space on…
Class 6 Theatre is a company that doesn’t always perform in the same venue, which is a little challenging if for no other reason than that people are creatures of habit. Even with all kinds of social media at your disposal, your returning audience will sometimes try to go where…
It’s disillusioning but, ultimately, reassuring to learn that improv comedy has structure and rules and stuff like that (for its performers). The reassuring part comes when you realize that 1) “solid improv experience” is not an oxymoron and 2) dedicated application of technique makes for reliable craziness (also not an…
It’s difficult to pin Stray Cat Theatre down — just one thing the company has in common with actual stray cats. The troupe’s selections are often super-gay, not unlike Nearly Naked’s; they like to do shows Phoenix hasn’t seen before, which is something Actors Theatre is also superb at. Maybe…
If it sounds implausible to you that three male stagehands with 4F draft classifications would decide to impersonate the Andrews Sisters (who are quarantined in Hawaii) to bolster troop morale at the big USO show, you should know that’s not an unusual way for show-biz types to address emergencies in…
Update: Oedipus for Kids opens Saturday, August 20; Spring Awakening opens June 15, 2012.) The Valley theater company that swears its name is not about running around with no clothes on but manages to do it with some regularity nevertheless (and for that, we salute them) has unveiled its latest…
Somewhere in the universe, there’s always going to be someone whose idea of contributing to society is transcribing the dialogue of old sitcoms and posting it online. Without such people, it’d be an even rarer thing to be able to walk into a bar and see live re-creations of episodes…
