Hormel New Works Festival at Phoenix Theatre

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…

Season Preview: Actors Theatre Gears Up for 2011-12

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…

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at Arizona Broadway Theatre

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…

Comic Belief

Playwright Rich Orloff’s devotion to the short and funny has scored him two Herberger Lunch Time Theater productions in a row this spring, beginning with the sketch revue Funny as a Crutch, presented through Thursday, May 12, by Improbable Theatre, whose niche is getting artists with disabilities onto the page…

Octopus from Stray Cat Theatre

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…

IMAGINATIONMACHINE

Modified Arts is the venue where Courtenay Gillean Cholovich presents this quasi-scientific study, peppered with whimsy, employing multimedia, and engaging the audience in a search for identity and meaning (or, as the promotional materials say, exploring ” … the line between imagination and memory, and the artist’s purpose … to…

festina lente Presents Two Powerful Solo Shows at PHX:fringe Festival

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…

The Blue Room at Nearly Naked Theatre

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,…