Type Michael Learned’s name into any Internet search engine, and you’ll find yourself linked to several hundred articles and dozens of Web sites devoted to The Waltons — and almost nothing about her notable stage career. Like a lot of former television stars, Learned’s theater credentials have been eclipsed by…
“Why the heck would anyone want to do a play about that?”I’ve been speaking for more than an hour with “Tony,” a convicted sex offender, about Mr. Bundy, Jane Martin’s one-act drama about a child molester. I’ve got a long list of questions I’d like Tony to consider — Does…
The will-call line for The Vagina Monologues snaked all the way across the lobby of the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, and I was the only man in it. That is, until another fellow — a local publisher of some renown, at least in publishing circles — approached the line;…
I usually leave playwright Joe Marshall’s comedies having found plenty to like. Marshall regularly offers interesting insights into the human condition; his people are usually at least amusing; his dialogue is often droll and sometimes downright funny. But In a Nutshell, which Marshall is presenting via his own Alternative Theatre…
I’ve wanted to see a worthwhile production of Once on This Island for more than a decade. I’ve long suspected that Stephen Flaherty’s and Lynn Ahrens’ musicalized Little Mermaid had great potential, that its folksy tale and melodic score could be elevated by the right cast and conductor. But now…
Opening-night performances by small theater companies usually play to half-empty houses — except, apparently, for shows with the phrase “sexual perversity” in their titles. Sexual Perversity in Chicago’s first night was a sellout for Nearly Naked Theatre Company, a fact that so pleased the show’s director that he photographed his…
My faithful theater companion and I normally agree about the quality of the shows we see every weekend. When we don’t, it’s he who is more generous and forgiving about a program’s shortcomings. Last weekend, during the long ride home from faraway Theater Works, we bandied words about the company’s…
The new musical revue at Phoenix Theatre epitomizes everything I loathe about the genre: It’s formulaic and predictable, full of half-written songs whose tunes I’d forgotten by the time I hit the parking lot. Why, then, did I so enjoy I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change?Almost certainly because this…
The Herberger’s center stage this week is splattered with paint and piled high with blank canvases. This carefully arranged mess (which bursts frequently into colorful life, thanks to Rick Paulsen’s extravagant lighting) is where Steven Dietz’s Inventing Van Gogh — the author’s fourth play to be commissioned by Arizona Theatre…
As a kid, I could never remember which one was Judy Collins. I shared a room with an older brother who favored female folk singers, all of whom, it seemed, had first names beginning with the letter J: Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Jennifer Warnes, Judee Sill, Judy Collins.”She gets that…
Bleacher Bums is a baseball comedy which, from its earliest moments, had me root root rooting for the curtain to fall. The kind folks at Ensemble Theater have set up a kiosk in the lobby so that one can, as the song goes, buy you some peanuts and Cracker Jack…
Michelle Gardner arrives bearing Danish. She shows up for what she calls her “farewell interview” clutching a four-foot-long cheese-and-blueberry concoction from Karsh’s, the kosher bakery her parents have owned for decades. She’s come to talk about Blown Sideways Through Life, the new one-woman show she’s starring in, as well as…
Luigi Pirandello’s Enrico IV is enjoying a revival. There’s a production running now at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, translated by Richard Nelson and directed by the company’s artistic director, and an independent film company is shooting an adaptation of the story for the BBC. I wonder if either is…
“It’s hard for men to date me,” admits Tori King. “I just can’t let go and trust someone. Which, in turn, is hard on me, because I have a huge libido.”King also has a huge success — with The More Men Weigh, the one-woman show that depicts the breakup of…
Rose Robinson is tired. She’s tired of white men calling all the shots; tired of dreaming about one day being a famous singer, like Billie Holiday; and sick of working in seedy nightclubs. She sings in Sam’s Jazz Club on weekends, and at any other sleazy bar with a bandstand…
Ever since Arizona Theatre Company announced early last year that it had optioned Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves, I’ve been wondering: Why? This threadbare marriage comedy is usually seen, on those occasions when it’s trotted out, at tiny community houses, where audiences are more tolerant of pale pleasantries…
After seeing her performance in In Mixed Company’s Pterodactyls, I have scratched Barbara McGrath from my list of Actors I’d Rather Not See On Stage Ever Again. McGrath’s star turn in Nicky Silver’s dark comedy has wiped away my memory of her last several attempts at acting, which I found…
Very occasionally, one of our local companies produces a perfect evening of theater. The first indication that Actors Theatre of Phoenix had weighed in with a contender came when the curtain rose on Jeff Thomson’s breathtaking set design for The Archbishop’s Ceiling. The first-night audience burst into excited applause and…
If the measure of a good play is its ability to evoke emotion, then Love Waits is a stunning success. The play’s teeny opening-night audience (I was joined by five patrons and an AriZoni adjudicator, one of those poor souls charged with judging plays for a dubious local theater awards…
When he closes his eyes, Heinrich Palmer can still see Phoenix from his home in Münster, Germany. “It was for me a very strange place,” he says, his accent thick. “Hard to forget, because of the bright sunlight every day, all that sandy dust, and the big cactus that looked…
Forget that I’m an atheist. Or that the last time I heard a disco song I liked was nearly a quarter-century ago. My objections to God’s Trombones are strictly critical. In its new production of this terribly contemporary musical, Black Theatre Troupe delivers a loud but largely ill-conceived collection of…
Those of us foolish enough to have left our handkerchiefs at home exited last week’s matinee of Wit wet-faced and weary. Arizona Theatre Company’s production of this extraordinary play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1999, is an emotionally exhausting hour and a half.Both entertaining and intellectually challenging,…
