Ballet Arizona’s Topia is the most sensory ballet experience we’ve ever had. After its successful debut last year, the show, created by Ballet Arizona artistic director Ib Andersen, is back at the Desert Botanical Garden for a second season. The 80-foot-long stage where the dancing takes place is aligned with…
When Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art announced it was bringing performer, author, and kickass entertainer Tania Katan on board to mix things up a year ago, we knew we were in for something good. Almost a year later, we’ve sat in a sold-out SMoCA Lounge a number of times to…
The setup: If it isn’t enough for you to know that the roman à clef that inspired the film Legally Blonde was written by ASU grad Amanda Brown (based on her Stanford experiences) or that the film, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is an oddly fluffy odyssey of female…
This Friday, Dulce Dance Company will debut Para Tus Ojos, a series of newly-choreographed movement pieces that seek to engage the audience in new ways. For starters, the performance will take place throughout several of the cavernous rooms in the Icehouse. “We wanted to make the audience feel that they’re…
The setup: Orange Theatre Group, not unlike the ASU Herberger College grad cohort that more or less begat it, Interrobang, and its other offshoot, festina lente, is committed to pushing the envelope of new drama, developing performance that connects with varying degrees of tenacity to the existing texts it’s often…
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. Last…
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…
The setup: Like pretty much every other theater with “Shakespeare” in its name, Mesa’s Southwest Shakespeare Company peppers each season with plays written by other people. They’re usually referred to as “classical.” Some companies also present newer shows that are Shakespeare-related or -inspired, and SSC has been doing quite a…
In this week’s reminder of the world’s inevitable and fiery end, 45-year-old, shake-and-bake Patricia Krentcil of New Jersey decided it was a good idea to do a topless photo shoot on an unnamed beach. Fair warning: What you’re about to see is a less toasty version of Krentcil, who was…
Fela Kuti was a man of many hats: Afrobeat pioneer, revolutionary, and outspoken crusader for political justice. Music was his weapon, a driving, pulsating, often hypnotic sound mixing jazz, soul, funk, blues and rock with Nigeria’s indigenous rhythms, which moved people spiritually and to action as much as it moved…
Jonathan Winters was an American artist and comedian, dubbed the “Pioneer of Improvisational Comedy.” Winters acted on stage and in films and television, including Stanley Kramer’s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Twilight Zone. He was known as a comedic chameleon who slipped in and out of characters…
The cast and crew behind downtown’s Space 55 first held “A Bitch in Time” two years ago. It was cheap (and semi last minute); no sets or costumes were required and actors had little time for rehearsal. The show sold out, and proceeds benefited the theater’s future productions. A year…
The setup: Neil Simon is still a massively popular American playwright — able to sell tickets on name alone when some shows can scarcely sell tickets at all — and his success gets in his way, critically speaking. You have to look at a theater company’s choice to do one…
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…
The setup: Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya takes guts to produce and mad brains and talent to produce tolerably. Don’t go to that link and read it; besides its morose nature, it’s full of those Russians with multiple nicknames and pretty hard to follow on the page (frustration bonus!). It’s two…
If you have any desire to hear more about why coffee is the new black, what’s in your wallet, or how to deal with chicken personality disorder, Ignite Phoenix No. 14 might be a good place to start. The event, on Friday, April 26, at the Scottsdale Center for the…
The end of 2007, just before the closure of the Paper Heart gallery, performance space, and beer and wine bar, was the approximate heyday of the Grand Avenue alt-arts scene, at least so far. Not that it isn’t still fun and diverting and full of promise for the future, but we’ll get to…
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…
Fans of Lisa Starry and her choreography might remember Water Dreams, her original water-themed production that debuted more than 10 years ago. It won her rave reviews, and in the years since, she’s only ingratiated herself all the more with Valley dance aficionados through her consistently lovable works, including the…
If you haven’t stopped into The Torch Theatre on Central Avenue in Phoenix for an improv show, you’re missing out. The group, headed up by board members Bill Binder, Jose Gonzalez, Jacque Arend, Sam Haldiman, Nina Miller, Mack Duncan, Shane Shannon, and Tommy Schaeffer , is consistently reinventing itself in…
The setup: For many of us late Boomers of the Valley, La Cage aux Folles was the first foreign film we got to go see all by ourselves as young adults, setting a standard for both comedy and the mainstreaming of gay cinema that’s been hard to match since. See…
If we were looking for reasons to show some appreciation for all that Ballet Arizona brings to the Valley arts scene, then we found three more to add to the list: choreographers Alexei Ratmansky and Alejandro Cerrudo and Director’s Choice. The pair of leading choreographers will join Ballet Arizona artistic…
