Best Culture on Your Lunch Hour 2012 | Lunch Time Theater at the Herberger Theater Center | People & Places | Phoenix
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Best Culture on Your Lunch Hour

Lunch Time Theater at the Herberger Theater Center

In the chilly, dark room at the back of this wonderful downtown building, in a space normally reserved for play rehearsals for Herberger residents Arizona Theater Company and Actors Theater, daytime magic sometimes happens. Lunch Time Theater is a going thing at 12:10 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays in the recently renamed Kax Stage. Showcasing the work of young, emerging theater companies, Lunch Time Theater offers up one-act plays lasting 30 to 45 minutes, to which daytime playgoers can bring a lunch or pre-order one from Lunch Time's own caterer. Tickets are a measly $6 apiece, not including lunch, and the short plays and musicals are top-notch stuff from seldom-seen, smaller local troupes. (Last season's schedule included work from the Improbable Theatre Company and popular Theatre Artists Studio.) Most shows offer an evening preview performance of each show on the Monday night of opening week, too.

Best Original Play by a Local Playwright

Dwayne Hartford's The Color of Stars

With his new play, The Color of Stars, Dwayne Hartford gave kids and grownups alike some fulfilling, provocative entertainment. With this emotional and vibrant drama, set in rural America during World War II, Hartford, the playwright in residence for Tempe's Childsplay theater, commented on our contemporary attitudes about wartime America with literate dialogue and sad, sometimes confused characters. Characters spoke of "Krauts" and "Japs" without tidy apologies tacked on by the playwright, who trusted that his audience, no matter its age, would find the morals lesson in an engaging story about loyalty and war and the love of a good family.

Best Actorly Homecoming

Kathy Fitzgerald in Gypsy

She used to be "ours," but then actress Kathy Fitzgerald left the Valley for New York and the Great White Way, and became — thanks to a long string of major successes including Wicked, 9 to 5, and the original company of a little thing called The Producers — "Broadway's Kathy Fitzgerald." Still, we were briefly able, earlier this year, to reclaim her when she came home to star in Phoenix Theatre's production of Gypsy. She played Mama Rose and, from the moment she made her entrance from the back of the house, carrying a Chihuahua and rasping a holler at her kids, took that old theater archetype — a woman whose made-up life was further rewritten in stories told by her daughter, Gypsy Rose Lee — and made her entirely real. Even if she weren't our hometown gal made good and a real-life Broadway star, it would have been impossible not to be knocked over by Kathy Fitzgerald's magnificent Mama Rose.

Best Didn't-See-That-Coming Performance

D. Scott Withers in Gypsy

This year, D. Scott Withers did the near-impossible: He gave some real depth to one of musical theater's most famously underwritten roles. Herbie, the love interest of Mama Rose in Arthur Laurents' Gypsy, is as one-dimensional as supporting roles get — perhaps because he's an apocryphal character who replaces the real-life Rose's many lesbian lovers. Whatever the reason, Herbie is a snooze — so long as he's not being played by Withers, who truly brought the guy to life in Phoenix Theatre's production of the famous tuner in March. Withers' big exit scene packed a wallop each night, and it may have been the only time that all eyes weren't on the marvelous Kathy Fitzgerald as his gal pal, Mama Rose.

Best Performance by an Actor Depicting a Differently Abled Person with Compassion

Tie: Will Hightower in Body Image and Travis Russell in The Pillowman

Martin McDonagh's notorious The Pillowman, about a writer of fables whose stories typically involve the sadistic murder of children, is a tough play to sell. The story, about the ways in which art informs our lives, focuses on a pair of brothers, one of them demented because he was tortured by his parents as a child. Listening to Michal recount that torture requires a performer both willing and able to play idiocy and rage with compassion and light humor. Travis Russell, who played Michal in Desert Stages Theatre's production, whipped in and out of dark comedy and frank tragedy with impressive ease.

Equally striking this season was young Will Hightower's performance as an autistic teen in Actors Theatre's burnished production of Body Image in April. Hightower went for comedy in his depiction of a disabled youth without ever tipping over into caricature or disrespect for the troubled teenager he portrayed.

Best Surprise from a Local Troupe

Phoenix Theatre's co-production with Nearly Naked Theatre

No one was surprised when Nearly Naked Theatre, arguably our most radical company, announced a production of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's Spring Awakening this time last year. But the fact that they were collaborating with Phoenix Theatre, inarguably the Valley's most conventional Equity house, was something of a shocker. This Tony-winning rock musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind's controversial 19th-century German play is precisely the type of sexy stuff that put Nearly Naked on the map, but it's a far cry from the tamer, more family-friendly fare that PT typically presents. Yet the august company made no attempt to tame Sheik and Sater's steamy story about the sexual awakening of a group of teenagers in a small German village. The show was tacked on as a bonus for PT's season subscribers — a wise marketing move, one that may bring a younger, hipper audience to the 92-year-old playhouse, which has been inching toward more adventurous material (Nine, Avenue Q) these past few seasons.

Best Holiday Show We Didn't See Last Year

iTheatre's Christmas Cabaret with Jeff Kennedy

It just didn't seem entirely like Christmas last year, because iTheatre's holiday cabaret went missing. For the first time in many years, we didn't have musical theater maestro Jeff Kennedy (that's Dr. Jeff Kennedy, for anyone who cares about his Ph.D.) and his band of merry Xmas elves to look forward to. Let's hope that Kennedy and company's hiatus is a one-shot deal, because we like nothing more in December of each year than to cozy up to one of the nightclub tables set up for this fun annual production, sipping a cocktail and listening to some of the Valley's most engaging vocalists deliver little-known, holiday-themed tunes.

Best Record Label

Acetic House

You won't find a website or Hello Merch profile for Acetic House, the Tempe-based imprint responsible for releases by Otro Mundo, Marshstepper, Avon Ladies, and more, as well as a swelling library of chap books, poetry, and private press collections of literary ephemera. It's hard to keep up with Acetic House, especially given the subversive, stubborn reluctance of its proprietors to promote and otherwise push its wares on fans. While other labels create memes encouraging (or badgering) active support, Acetic House operates on the fringes and in the shadows. You can find it — but you have to know where to look, a refreshing rarity in an over-exposed, every-detail-on-display indie rock world.

Best Place to Become a Recording Engineer

Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences

If the quality of any institution of higher learning is measured by the achievements of its alumni, then the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences arguably is the best sound school in Arizona, and probably the entire United States, for that matter. Since first opening in Tempe more than 25 years ago, this high-fidelity Hogwarts has produced audio wizards and recording engineers who have racked up a slew of Grammies and more than 300 gold albums. For instance, graduate Robert Anderson engineered CeCe Peniston's 1991 mega-hit "Finally," and fellow alum Ethan Willoughby collaborated with Justin Timberlake on the pop star's first two discs. Meanwhile, Chad Carlson took home a golden gramophone for his work on Taylor Swift's You Belong with Me. Ditto with Moka Nagatini, who co-recorded Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. The secret to CRAS' successful alumni is largely its close working relationships between faculty and students, bleeding-edge technology, and ample amounts of state-of-the-art recording facilities available at both of its campuses. Training is split between two intense, 15-week sessions at each location, where experienced instructors like audio recording/production expert Mark Brisbane, a former protégé of Hollywood soundtrack czar Hans Zimmer, help polish burgeoning engineers until they're golden — literally.

Best Place to Become a DJ

The DJ Program at Scottsdale Community College

Rob Wegner has spent a good chunk of his life perched behind the mixers at dance clubs. So much so that the 48-year-old says that DJ booths have practically become his second home. ("I've even slept in a few of 'em," he jokes.) Wegner's a 30-year veteran of the local nightlife circuit who's gigged at infamous clubs both past (Sanctuary, Zazoo) and present (Axis/Radius, Narcisse), accumulated some serious turntable experience, and amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the DJ game. So it isn't surprising that he's spent the past decade educating embryonic mixmasters in the classrooms of Scottsdale Community College. In 2001, Wegner helped launch the nation's first DJ classes at an accredited public institution, and he has taught many a would-be wax-worker the art and science of spinning up the hits. But forget about learning the proper fist-pumping for your set or how to choose killer shades for promotional photos, as Wegner and a cadre of other local turntablists (including Steven "Tranzit" Chung and "Ruthless" Ramsey Higgins) instead lay down the true fundamentals of DJing. Through five distinct courses, basics like song selection, beat-matching, and blending are covered, moving on to scratching, vinyl manipulation, performance techniques, and other next-level shit. As for coming up with the perfect DJ nickname, that's on your own time, bub.

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