The most important theatre event of this decade, Tony Kushner’s epic masterpiece Angels in America, has arrived in Phoenix. It is the largest and deepest play since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? hit Broadway in 1962, and joins A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and A Long Day’s…

After a vagabond year, changing location with each production, Phoenix Theatre is celebrating its 75th season in a newly refurbished home. The ample lobby, rest rooms and plush seats make the facility, renovated at a cost of $5 million, an attractive destination for an evening out. To christen the theatre’s…

Theater Works is turning out its annual miracle: a great, bloated Broadway musical on a tiny stage in a barn. The occasion is its revival of Jerry Herman’s Mame, featuring 156 costumes and a sterling star turn. When the literati debate the virtues of Stephen Sondheim versus Andrew Lloyd Webber,…

“I need a man!” screech female voices in the Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s classic tale of Spanish suppression, The House of Bernarda Alba. Since that sentiment suggests a solution rather simplistic for today’s women, one is left to ponder this play of sexual repression as…

Harold Pinter is arguably the most influential English dramatist in the second half of the 20th century. Traces of Pinter’s spare and oblique dialogue can be found in the works of Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Kopit, Sam Shepard, David Mamet and John Guare. Pinter spent the first ten years…

The Diviners came to my attention by winning the prestigious American College Theatre Festival Award at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. I brought author James Leonard Jr. to New York to participate in the Circle Repertory Company Plays-in-Progress series that spring. Based on the success of that staged reading,…

Grand Canyon University has launched a promising season of Shakespeare with a scintillating production of Tom Stoppard’s contemporary classical romp Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The sensation of the 1967 season on Broadway–it won the New York Drama Critics’ and Tony awards for Best Play–Stoppard’s witty deconstruction of Hamlet ran…

This New York theatre season will be remembered as the year of the penises. The age of the gay play has arrived with a vengeance, and with an unprecedented display of genitalia. With five gay plays currently playing on New York stages, it is clear that repressing one’s behavior is…

There have been many versions of Victor Hugo’s classic melodrama The Hunchback of Notre Dame, several of them captured on film. Most memorable is the 1923 silent film starring “the man of a thousand faces,” the legendary Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. The hunchback received a voice in the brilliant 1939…

Probably the best argument that can be made for continuing federal funding for the arts is to consider what kind of entertainment would proliferate if market demands become the sole influence on artistic repertoire. One measure by which we might gauge expectations for the theatre is to gaze into a…

On March 31, 55 years ago, the golden age of the American musical was born. It is easy to imagine the shiver the audience must have experienced on that opening night, when the houselights went down and, without an overture, the curtain rose on a farmhouse and a windmill etched…

“The time has come to speak of love,” the Narrator solemnly tells us. “The lover and the beloved come from different countries. The curt truth is that in a deep, secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many; for the lover craves any possible relation with the…

Forget Las Vegas! Fly over to Gammage Auditorium instead. You’ll lose your frequent-flier miles, but you’ll catch the most scintillating flash of flesh the law will allow. I’m speaking, of course, of that simple children’s Bible tale, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. If, like most of us, you’d love…

A couple of things really pissed me off when I turned 50: It wasn’t enough that my junk mail started to include weekly solicitations to join AARP, I had to buy glasses from the drugstore to read them. If that didn’t make you smile, you probably won’t enjoy Ivan Menchell’s…

Arizona Theatre Company has joined Actors Theatre of Phoenix by ending the season not with a bang, but saving a buck. Both theatres concluded the year with one-man shows. Last month, ATP gave us An Evening With Groucho, and now we have an opportunity for theatrical dj vu. Actually, ATC’s…

“Can Broadway be saved?” was the question on the cover of New York magazine last week. Inside, Michael Goldstein prescribed a 12-step program to restore the flagship of the American theatre to its former glory. First, he says, Broadway must admit it’s got a problem. If you were one of…

If you saw Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, you may have some insight into the final offering of the season by Actors Theatre of Phoenix, now playing in Stage West at Herberger Theater Center. In that 1960 film, Olivier portrays Archie Rice, a vaudeville song-and- dance man down on his…

Last weekend, in the chilly confines of Mesa Amphitheatre, an actor entreated us: “Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.” Not to worry. After suffering through a season of Shakespearean mediocrity, Phoenix audiences should welcome a robust rendition of Shakespeare’s most mature historical drama, The Life of King Henry…

Stephen Sondheim’s most sublime achievements surpass anything in the musical theatre since Rodgers and Hammerstein. I would include among these Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street; Sunday in the Park With George; and his most recent, the controversial Passion. Still pretty good, if not of the first rank,…

There’s not a bat in sight in the world premiäre of Arizona Theatre Company’s compelling new version of Dracula, currently stalking Herberger Theater Center. But bats are about the only thing missing from Steven Dietz’s faithful rendition of Bram Stoker’s 1897 tale of horror. ATC commissioned Dietz, author of this…

The sensational story of Medea has fascinated audiences throughout time. Corneille wrote a version in 1635, and Cherubini turned it into an opera in 1797. Broadway has produced this play more often (and more successfully) than any other classic. Dame Judith Anderson won a Tony Award as Best Actress in…

The best play of 1966 has arrived in Phoenix, and even 29 years later, it is still the most outrageous comedy of the season. It’s also one of the funniest. The play is Joe Orton’s Loot, in a production by Tres Repertory Theatre in Park Central Mall. Now half-deserted, this…