Yours, Anne: It sounds like the punch line to an unfortunate joke, but this musical adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank is utterly serious. Presented as a song cycle rather than a traditional book musical, Yours, Anne presents Frank’s legendary journal as a series of dramatic scenes set to…
Thirty years ago, it was considered clever to spoof obscure science-fiction films. Stage musicals like The Rocky Horror Show and movies like Phantom of the Paradise were all the rage, and movie nerds who knew our George Pal and our Herschell Gordon Lewis felt vindicated in our passion for cheesy…
David Salcido is big on titles. As a flack for Artists’ Theatre Project, the smallish local troupe he co-founded, he’s known as the Master of Hoopla and Revelries. At the underground zine Blue Food, he’s called the Chaos Coordinator. And in all seriousness, Salcido’s playbill bio refers to him as…
Singer-actress Karen Morrow’s long and varied career has brought her acclaim (an Emmy and a tall stack of Dramalogue Awards) and some pretty wide-ranging roles (Parthy in the 1994 touring revival of Showboat; Endora-wanna-be Aunt Minerva on the treacly Bewitched spin-off, Tabitha). On her way to town to teach a…
Suds: Local critics haven’t much liked this goofball extravaganza of tunes from the 1960s, and who can blame them? Of the innumerable inane musical revues that attempt to wrap era-specific pop songs around a slim story, this one’s the hokiest. To sell its silly tale of a Laundromat owner who…
I’ve seen three plays about mothers and daughters this month — two of them just this past week. Pearls: Motherhood Unstrung collects monologues by and about mothers, authored by local writers and read by local actors. The Last Lists of My Mad Mother, about a middle-aged woman dealing with her…
So she can’t sing. Robyn Allen can do most everything else on stage — and has. When she’s not performing (most recently in Phoenix Theatre’s The Women; currently in The Beauty Queen of Leenane), she’s often directing; the rest of the time she’s running the West Valley’s Algonquin Theater Company…
For the past six years, Patti Hannon has been starring in both Late Nite Catechism and Late Nite Catechism II at Scottsdale Center for the Arts. “I love playing Sister,” she says of the grouchy nun with the soft spot for Catholic school kids, a character with whom she’s spent…
Actor/producer/writer Debra Gettleman does everything from arranging chairs to selling tickets for Pearls: Motherhood Unstrung, which she’s co-produced with Mothers Who Write instructors Deborah Sussman Susser (associate editor of Jewish News of Greater Phoenix) and Amy Silverman (managing editor of this newspaper). Gettleman (who has taken Mothers Who Write more…
A traffic cop yelled at me on my way into the theater the other night. He blew his whistle and shouted at me because I was crossing against the light on one of the several hundred streets that have been rendered useless by the light-rail project. I don’t think police…
When he’s not busy being a television actor (perhaps you’ve seen him on Boston Legal, or Everwood, or Nip/Tuck), Austin Tichenor is one-third of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, a three-man comedy troupe known for taking long, serious subjects and reducing them into short, sharp comedies. They’ve previously taken on Shakespeare…
A Chorus Line: That tried-and-true celebration of the unsung heroes of American musical theater, the chorus boys and gals, is traipsing back into town — and this time it comes with an entree! The second-longest-running show in Broadway history won both a Tony and a Pulitzer and features the now-classic…
Usually when indie filmmakers get a little street cred, they head for Hollywood or start scouting a bigger distribution deal. Not Phoenix film writer/director Craig McMahon, who’s made a name for himself in independent horror film circles with straight-to-DVD movies like Creep and Laws of Deception. Despite a defiantly snarky…
Pearls: Motherhood Unstrung: This tribute to moms and momism is culled from a collection of essays by the students of Mothers Who Write, a creative writing workshop for mothers sponsored by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. The play incorporates pieces both comic and tragic about divorce, finding God, and…
The good news is that no theater company has announced a production of Cats this season. The bad news is that every single other tired old musical ever written will make its way to local stages over the next several months. Surprise! And welcome to the 2006-2007 theater season, which…
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an entire generation of middle-aged men who refuse to believe that the actor who played the original Superman could have killed himself! Okay, so maybe they’re not up in the sky. Mostly they’re on the Internet, swapping conspiracy…
Linda Pollack’s not getting older, dammit. She’s getting bluer. Pollack has founded a local chapter of the Blue Thong Society, a group of fiftyish women who want more from middle age than just crow’s-feet and expanding waistlines. She swears the blue underwear isn’t mandatory, but apparently cocktailing and a fondness…
I hate dogs. It’s one of several things about me that people point to as proof that I’m not a human being. But I have my reasons for recoiling at the sight (and smell!) of nearly every canine I’ve ever come across. Like the fact that an especially large, brutish…
The Hispanick Zone: This comedy, written and directed by Teatro Bravo founder Guillermo Reyes, launches the company’s new season. Set in Arizona in 2006 and told in sketch comedy format, it depicts the world (and the Legislature) as ruled by humorless people. Reyes spoofs assimilation, deportation, and the hotties of…
It’s not unfathomable that Richard Greenberg’s exuberantly chatty Take Me Out won all the big-deal theater awards in 2003. Greenberg’s supple use of language and powerful characterizations make this an entertaining, if not especially enlightening, mediation on oft-trod themes. Fine actors will certainly continue to bring to this play better…
He’s played everything from a foppish French baron (in Les Liaisons Dangereuses) to a seven-foot-tall singing whisk (in Beauty and the Beast). These days, while he waits to go on as a gay baseball player in Take Me Out, Joe Kremer is learning to play Texas Hold ‘Em and recalling…
After nearly three decades at the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Shelley Cohn departed for civilian life last year. During her stay — most of which was spent as the agency’s executive director — she presided over the commission’s arts programs, protecting us from a future with no ongoing arts…
