After just about a year of seeing a play a week for this column, I’m starting to catch some of the same fabulous performers over and over again, working in different companies for different directors, and realize why they get cast a lot. Choosing the cast for a play is…
Try traveling, growing up, and/or growing old with two other people, and you’ll realize there’s hardly anything on which three can agree — each takes a turn as the sore loser. Such conflict suffuses Anton Chekhov’s drama Three Sisters (allegedly inspired by the real-life Brontës), whose heroines, in turn, planted…
Many of our favorite stories are love stories, or at least have love stories in them — the thrill of new relationships, the steam of lust, the warm comfort of a lifelong, mutual romance — but relatively few novels, plays, or movies are about love. The phenomenon. The indefinable but undeniable condition that…
Somewhere near the risk-taking gene that makes people jump off stuff, there must be a gene that prompts humans to crave novelty in a somewhat more subdued way. Just give us something we haven’t seen a thousand times before — a new play by a new writer, say, in which…
If your inner Cindy Lou Who is craving an electric parade, Santa’s arrival, fireworks, and a massive tree, then be in place for opening night of the annual APS Fantasy of Lights. The Mill Avenue District, a sparkly, sometimes-crazed wonderland from now through New Year’s, gets extra-sparkly and family-cozy for…
Is the Phantom of the Opera a ghost with supernatural powers, or is he just your typical freaky, deformed cellar-dweller who skulks around the opera house playing scary, steampunky tricks to manipulate the management into doing his bidding? That’s just one of the details I shouldn’t reveal to anyone who’s never seen the Andrew Lloyd…
It’s no picnic having one’s grammatical errors bitched about. Hey, we know. But Mignon “Grammar Girl” Fogarty makes vocab rehab fun. Her weekly podcast (the cornerstone of the quickanddirtytips.com empire) answers listeners’ questions in bite-size, mnemonic-filled morsels. “I hear from a lot of people who want to do better at…
Last summer, I took advantage of time alone in a friend’s lovely Seattle home to curl up and read several books from his home library, including Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The Happiness Myth. It looks at how modern life stresses and drains us and identifies five tried-and-true historic aspects of human…
When Jimmy Carter visited Changing Hands Bookstore, the parking lot overflowed. When pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell spoke, his genius-y head disappeared in the crowd. So Changing Hands has booked award-winning author Barbara Kingsolver at a larger venue, just down the road: the auditorium of Tempe’s Marcos De Niza High School…
If you’ve provided an alternative to soulless megacorporate retail since 2005, have you gone “establishment”? Local First Arizona’s Certified Local Fall Festival turns kindergarten-age Saturday, November 7, but if they’re The Man, we dig it. The party includes scads of local-centric indie vendors, free food samples, craft activities for kids,…
Scotty Jeffers, a talented and popular Valley actor and musician who’d graced our stages continuously ever since his Washington High School days, died suddenly Saturday night, October 31, at the age of 38, from what friends were told was cardiac arrest triggered by a pulmonary embolism. He had just completed…
A new educational performance company is in town, scaring your kids and introducing them to actual literature. And they are kicking ass at it, based on the public performances of Poe that Arizona Curriculum Theater is currently presenting at Soul Invictus. (The Emily Dickinson programming in their catalog might not be as…
These days, serious stage drama is scarcer than hen’s teeth. Fortunately, when Space 55 Theatre isn’t bringing the pants-wetting funny, the downtown troupe offers moving alternatives to musicals, farces, and sitting at home with CSI. At 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, November 3, it opens a comfort-zone-busting trifecta: Phillip E. Schmeidl’s The…
Halloween’s a richly complicated holiday that began when Samhain, a harvesty Gaelic fest, got mashed up with All Saints’ Day, the heavy-duty Catholic day of obligation, and its hangover, All Souls’ Day. As centuries passed, some Christian denominations started feeling ooky about how much the American Halloween seems to trivialize…
Tap-dancing has become kind of a specialty thing, though maybe I’m the only person who ever found it mainstream. Anyway, you don’t see tap numbers frequently, and sometimes when you do see one, the shoes don’t all have taps on them and the orchestra plays really loud so you can’t…
At an evening of poetry and spoken word, should one express any uncertainty about which is which? Well, a lady in hipster specs once snapped at us, “If you don’t understand the difference between theater and performance art, you’re not performance artists.” But nobody at Deus Ex Machina is that…
Last week, we talked about Curtains (the musical mystery) here in Curtains (the online theater review column at PHXmusic.com). In another of those crazy coincidences, this week’s review is of another thriller (but without songs) by one of Curtains’ (the play’s) several authors, Rupert Holmes, who was, for decades, best known for writing…
Laura Durant Rusty Ferracane plays Cioffi in Curtains. If this is your first visit to this particular blog feature, I should probably point out that it’s always called “Curtains” — we thought it was a cool name for a theater review column — but this week the play I saw is also called…
It’s always been rough to be a teenager (or to know one), but up until about 50 years ago, you could count on going to war, marrying young, and/or working your butt off for a living to distract you from hormonal storms, existential angst, and the cruel disappointment of finding…
One of my favorite “little musicals” ever, ever, ever is Oil City Symphony. I could eat eggplant Parmigiana and watch that show for five, six days in a row and not need another diversion. You don’t see Oil City produced a lot these days, maybe partly because the four original cast members all…
In writing A Sudden Shot: The Phoenix Serial Shooter, Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist Kimball sat through weeks of testimony, gained the trust of cops, prosecutors, witnesses, survivors, and families, analyzed volumes of police reports, and penned a gripping tale of investigators working against the clock to capture and convict two…
No one really doubts that professional entertainers are as maddeningly human as the rest of us. Nevertheless, the nostalgic farces of contemporary playwright Ken Ludwig mine comic gold from pondering that mystery. Typically, two groups of characters bump both literally and figuratively into each other: talented, worn-out, disillusioned “stars” and…
