When he wrote Moon Over Buffalo, Ken Ludwig must have been counting on an audience that hadn’t seen the dozen or so funnier plays and movies that have been hung on similar show-biz hooks. And Phoenix Theatre seems to be hoping its ticketholders won’t be distracted by the shuddering sense…
In the past, I’ve carped about Arizona Jewish Theatre Company’s lamentable productions and its less-than-kosher choice of material. But the company more than makes up for past indiscretions with its current staging of Jonathan Tolins’ modern morality play The Twilight of the Golds. Unlike AJTC’s usual lite fare, Twilight is…
Shakespeare purists or anyone who groans upon hearing the word “deconstruction” should stay far away from Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief, the latest offering from In Mixed Company. Playwright Paula Vogel’s hilarious one-act takes a sidelong glance at Othello, and asks: What were Desdemona and her gal pals up…
I attended The Heiress, a play about lost love, on Valentine’s Day in the company of a couple of reformed bachelors. Until recently, each of us had bombed at romance, and had resigned himself to whatever the equivalent of male spinsterhood is. Our postplay discussion–about leading with your heart instead…
It’s a testimony to the talents of director Marshall W. Mason that the opening-night crowd for King Lear stayed to cheer his achievement. Because, despite Mason’s expertise, this Arizona State University production of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy trades each triumph for a disaster: While the sets are wonderful, the costumes…
White Picket Fence is a show that’s built for failure. For starters, it’s a dramedy about race relations in which the principal characters are two 8-year-old boys played by grown men. In its premier production, the play is being co-produced by competing theater companies, a tricky proposition for which there’s…
Our grandparents might consider male transvestism a daring subject for a drama. The rest of us, having seen plenty of this sort of stuff on TV talk shows, attend a program like PlayWright’s Theatre’s The Wedding Present with hopes for a new take on a tired topic. Unfortunately, this production,…
It’s ironic that Phoenix Theatre is making such a big deal of Crooners–unlike the company’s other musical hits Forever Plaid and The Taffetas–being a book musical rather than a revue. Press materials stress that Crooners does more than just string together popular songs of a certain era; it tells a…
At first glance, the lineup of this season’s holiday plays looks encouraging. In tandem with the usual sackful of Christmas Carols that gets trotted out every December, several small local companies are presenting alternative–sometimes even outrageous-sounding–holiday fare. About a third of the dozen Christmas plays treading the boards this month…
Remember that attraction at Disneyland that features a creaky, prosthetic Abe Lincoln who talks about his life and rattles off an animatronic Emancipation Proclamation? That’s what Ben Tyler’s Goldwater: Mr. Conservative could easily have been. But thanks to some unsentimental writing, this 90-minute, one-man commemoration of Arizona’s best-known former senator…
Athol Fugard has written some of the most important plays of our time. His Master Harold . . . and the boys and My Children! My Africa! have presented hard evidence of how South African politics have pried apart the lives of its people. But with the end of apartheid,…
Among this month’s local events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel is a pair of thoughtful, Jewish-themed theater productions. Both detail the Nazi oppression of the Jews during World War II, and both are presented by companies funding the shows either with grant money from Jewish organizations…
The Ensemble Theatre’s production of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story is the sort of theater we see precious little of these days: a spare, uncluttered production that emphasizes a well-written story and some good, solid acting. This small, unpretentious company was founded last year by Arizona State University theater alumni,…
It is a few minutes before midnight on a recent Saturday and I am about to relive my childhood in a dark, smelly moviehouse in Tempe. Now surrounded by people half my age who are excited just to be awake at this hour, I required an afternoon nap just to…
“Gay men are supposed to be this highly evolved, artistic band of people,” says theater producer Christopher Wynn, “so how come our plays are sold to us with the promise of 10 swinging dicks onstage at every performance?” Wynn, an actor and former Phoenician, moved to Manhattan four years ago…
When Neil Simon’s name appears in print, it’s usually set off by one of those nearly epigrammatic phrases like “a name that is synonymous with American comedy,” or “Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.” Given the number of Simon plays that was produced here last year, his name might well have been appended…
Last week, two very different plays about ethnic minority cultures opened at local Equity houses. August Wilson’s brilliant Seven Guitars is a study of 1940s black America haunted by the author’s recent statements against multicultural theater, while Our Lady of the Tortilla is Latino playwright Luis Santiero’s satire of old…
The Actors Group production of Love! Valour! Compassion!, Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning epic about friendship and fealty told by a lot of frequently naked gay men, is a manipulative, richly comedic three-act that probably plays better to a gay crowd than a straight one. Its frequent references to campy old…
College theater depends heavily on the largess of its audience. It may be fair to expect a workmanlike performance from an Equity player, or to grumble about a crummy community-theater production, but it’s unreasonable to expect greatness from theater-student shows. Student productions–the bulk of whose audiences are usually blood-related–beg our…
Watching Phoenix Theatre’s production of Lizard is like listening to a bad joke told by a beautiful person. Dennis Covington’s meandering morality tale has been superbly mounted and is acted by one of the most impressive local casts in recent memory. But beneath the glitzy facade and despite all the…
It’s tough, even in a town with a large theatrical talent pool, to cast an all-singing, all-dancing musical revue. In Phoenix, it’s next to impossible. And when you’re talking about a show that relies on the talents of six African-American hoofers with big voices, the casting choices are even more…
Before there was Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, there was the playwright’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique, written by the French lawyer and dramatist in 1635. Like Kushner, Corneille is better known for a later drama: His 1637 neoclassic tragedy Le Cid enjoyed enormous critical success. Today,…
