Stray Cat Theatre’s production of Trista Baldwin’s Chicks with Dicks commences with a go-go dancing competition and a lap dance, and heads south from there. This unyielding camp comedy is so relentlessly awful, it should be offered up not as entertainment but as punishment for the worst possible crimes. See…
You submitted nominations for awards given to the Valley’s emerging creatives and the results are in. Introducing our Big Brain 2013 Finalists. Leading up to the Big Brain Award awards announcement and celebration on April 27, Chow Bella and Jackalope Ranch will introduce the finalists. Up today: Leah Marche Performance…
You submitted nominations for awards given to the Valley’s emerging creatives and the results are in. Introducing our Big Brain 2013 Finalists. Leading up to the Big Brain Award awards announcement and celebration on April 27, Chow Bella and Jackalope Ranch will introduce the finalists. Up today: Space 55 “We’re…
Charles L. Mee’s Soot and Spit is, in its ASU première, beautiful to behold. Cloaked in shadows, fractured with light, its 90 minutes chug along earnestly, sometimes passionately. If only Mee’s play (if, indeed, that’s what this is) were more entertaining. And more edifying. One leaves the theater having seen…
John Smith is the secret love child of Elvis Presley. And he has, he swears, the DNA evidence to prove it. No, really. Smith, a sometime country singer and songwriter who lives in Scottsdale, says he’s coming clean this month in a new book detailing his hush-hush life as the…
Musical of Musicals (The Musical) has a beard a mile long. This send-up of Broadway tuners should, at this point in the let’s-spoof-musical-theater game, play like a post-peak retread, an afterthought of irony, a late-to-the-party lesser-than Forbidden Broadway. But, in its Theater Works production, there is the joy of watching…
Chow Bella has a valentine for you. For the rest of February, we’re handing out Candy Hearts — stories of food and love from some of our favorite writers. Enjoy. I know a 12-year-old who eats nothing but peanut butter and chicken fingers. Three meals a day. No kidding. She…
The ways in which revolutions disrupt the lives of the winners has been well documented. In Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man, we consider the losers — in this case, of the Civil War — and reside, courtesy of a strong production at the Black Theatre Troupe, with three actors whose…
Taz Loomans left town yesterday. For most people, that won’t mean a thing. But for those of us whose livelihood or avocation involves hand-wringing about the local state of architectural affairs, it’s proof of our worst fears: that the folks who love this city and want to help it grow…
Somehow, I missed the whole storytelling movement. I wish I could tell you it’s because I was learning how to use my new iPhone, or that I was so distracted by my Twitter account that the entire storytelling fad passed me by. But I’m a low-tech fogey. My phone is…
I called my friend Nathan the other day and asked him to join me in seeing Nearly Naked Theatre’s new production of Equus. “No,” he told me, without hesitation. “The production they did 10 years ago was perfect, and if this new one isn’t, it will ruin my memory of…
Christmas has come early for fans of good writing and excellent acting, courtesy of Stray Cat Theatre’s production of Steve Yockey’s Wolves. The play, which squeaks onto my list of best plays of 2012 at the very end of the year, is a violent drama with no real gore; a…
Ah, the holidays. Christmas is all about love, sharing, sweetness and light — and keeping the antacids handy. In keeping with the spirit of the season, Chow Bella presents “Eating Christmas,” in which some of our favorite writers nosh on the real lessons we learn this time of year. Today,…
I almost never attend Sunday evening theater performances. I did on a recent weekend, when I went to see Arizona Theatre Company’s Lombardi, about the life and football coaching career of NFL hero Vince Lombardi. Sunday night audiences, I can now tell you, are distinctly different from the opening night…
Bill Tonnesen is distracted by dog shit. A wet, orange-brown turd on a concrete paver at one of the several rental properties he’s recently renovated has stopped him dead in his tracks. “Oh, noooooo!” Tonnesen moans, pointing at the mess. “How did that get here? We’d better . . …
If you hadn’t heard of the David and Gladys Wright House until recently, it’s because its late owners — the son and daughter-in-law of pioneering 20th-century architect Frank Lloyd Wright — did their best to keep their home off the radar of Wright fanatics and local looky-loos. And if you…
I found myself wondering, while watching Ron May being Mike Daisey in Actors Theatre’s The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, how it would be to watch May perform in this piece and not be preoccupied by admiration for his fine performance. Probably I’d have been distracted anyway, wondering about…
Nearly Naked Theatre has joined the fray and moved its curtain time from the more traditional 8 p.m. to a half-hour earlier, and therefore I — not having paid attention to these details — missed the first 15 minutes of Parallel Lives, its season opener. Which turned out not to…
It’s happening again: Another Valley theater season is about to commence. Beginning in September, Phoenicians will step out of short pants (well, most of them, anyway) and into grownup clothes for a couple of hours every few weekends, just long enough to take in a play. One hopes so, anyway…
You’re standing in an art museum, staring into a pot of blue water out of which air bubbles occasionally burble. You’re chuckling to yourself and shaking your head in disbelief. Were this a bucket and an air hose and some colored water, you’d be offended by the pretense of this…
One day last summer, I found myself standing on a wobbly stool in a tiny, sweltering cottage in a part of midtown Phoenix that had long been the butt of local jokes. I was there to help paint the kitchen of an old, lath-and-plaster bungalow that had been donated to…
Desert Stages Theatre’s production of Rent never stops moving. The relentless, often abrasive energy that fuels Jonathan Larson’s musical also holds it aloft in this umpteenth restaging, which may be the brightest adult entertainment July has to offer. Yet in spite of all this frenetic motion, Rent — co-directed by…
