For theater so new you have to be careful not to touch its soft spot, Phoenix Theatre’s annual Hormel New Works Festival is a safe bet. It’s also one of those rare occasions that the development of art is as much fun for the audience as it is for the…

When we crave a home-town taste of the kind of theater that makes us miss New York, Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco — more thoughtful (though often still gaspingly funny), less spectacle-driven works that audiences elsewhere have enjoyed relatively recently — Actors Theatre is the place to go. The company’s staked…

I hope nothing’s seriously wrong with the woman who plays Violet Beauregarde in Arizona Broadway Theatre’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which doesn’t come with a printed program). She was missing this morning, causing her and Mrs. Beauregarde’s parts of the factory scenes to be cut. That’s a shame. I’m…

From time to time, I’ve noticed that a play called Over the River and Through the Woods is being presented by some community theater that’s known for sticking to very traditional, family-friendly musicals and comedies. (We have more than one theater like that in the Valley.) And the title’s made…

The intelligence (sometimes coupled with a cheerful sadism) of certain playwrights produces work that’s a genuine challenge to pull off. Alan Ayckbourn can do the trick for a community theater; for professionals the likes of those with Southwest Shakespeare Company, it apparently takes Oscar Wilde to (metaphorically) slice their tendons…

It’s that time of year when some of us are a bit more free to get out of town occasionally, and whether you want to go or have to go, you might need a guide to diversions in strange places. Curtains is happy to visit such exotic locales as Anthem…

Do sketch comedy long enough, and you’ll even be able to compile The Best of Tim Meadows. It’s taken Valley troupe Th [sic] Sense far less than 25 years, though, to whomp up a Best Of show that, while lengthy, includes almost nothing you wouldn’t want to see again (and…

courtesy of Space 55 Theatre From left, Patti Hannon, Shawna Franks, and Clifton Highfield in The Bakers of Lakewood. ​If there’s a more consistently employed Valley stage actor than Patti Hannon, I’ll be very surprised to hear it. Ever since Maripat Donovan’s nationwide hit, the interactive Catholicism-inspired hoot Late Night…

It’s so freaking cool when someone adapts a classic book or story for the stage and gets everything right while also helping the literature grow into a captivating multisensory experience. British writer Charles Way has accomplished this feat with The Borrowers, based on the first two of Mary Norton’s series…

Billy Elliot the Musical opened in London in 2005, but it didn’t cross the pond until 2008, and the first national tour company has visited only a few large North American cities. The second touring company based on the Tony-winning Broadway version (which is still running) arrived in Tempe last…

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” the character Blanche Du Bois famously said, in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Given, she was being toted off by men in white coats, but that makes her observation no less trenchant, not to mention worthy of a big musical…

Oh, you guys, it’s terrible luck in the world of theater to have peacock feathers in your set or costume or props. And as Judy Garland’s mother, Valerie Saunders wears a passel of them (in one of several mostly striking and accurate costumes by the show’s author, local writer Richard…

If you’re not in school, there’s no real downside to “misinterpreting” a work of art. Curtains thinks that if you’re enlightened (or just plain entertained) by a book or song, then that’s part of the art that happened. Many artists not only don’t care exactly how you respond, they’re bemused…

Here we are, smack in the middle of PHX:fringe, with just three days to go. So many shows; such a plethora of choices! Curtains wishes Big Blue or Watson could have plotted out what showed promise, what coincided with Curtains’ uncommitted time, what allowed time to write about it for…

Two things you have to know right away: Tonight, Thursday, April 7, student tickets to Octopus are $10 with ID. (!!!) And Friday and Saturday nights, April 8 and 9, playwright Steve Yockey will be in town and at the theater for a post-Octopus discussion with director Ron May and…

Most of the kidnapping Arizona’s famous for is the imprisonment and torture of undocumented immigrants held hostage by smugglers who attempt to extort additional payment from loved ones, or by other gangs who kidnap them from their original coyote. Similar (and often more deadly) situations face Central Americans who cross…

In our world of choreographed flash mobs and revolution-by-Twitter, it may seem odd that an arts festival takes time to grow and develop over the years. But it does. Ideas lead to plans lead to experience leads to word of mouth, which generates new plans and experiences, until something reaches…

If you’re available to really immerse yourself in this year’s PHX:fringe Festival, starting Friday, April 1, a bicycle might be the way to go, one’s mobility permitting. No performance venue is far from the Roosevelt-to-McDowell corridor, between Seventh Street and 13th Avenue, and it’s getting too warm out to sprint…

Arthur Schnitzler was both a doctor and a playwright (as was Anton Chekhov) in turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna. His play Reigen, most commonly known as La Ronde, is about a lot of things, but it’s partly about how easy it is to spread syphilis.Demonstrating that lesson involves a lot of sexual promiscuity,…