On January 28, the Musical Instrument Museum is partnering with the American Chinese Arts and Culture Exchange Association to celebrate the Chinese New Year. According to Courtney Tjaden, Events and Volunteer Manager at the museum, there will be a number of events and performances that pay tribute to 2012, the year…
Playwrights have to make several decisions in the course of their work (unless they’re lucky enough to be able to make great drama flying by the seats of their pants). One of the trickiest chores is what to do with your Big Idea, if you know what it is at…
A good friend of mine used to manage a bookstore. (A lot of people used to manage a bookstore.) In their proud, intellectual geekiness, her employees tended to look just terrible. It wasn’t that anyone expected them to spend money on clothes; if they’d just made the effort to be…
Theater fans are anticipating Nearly Naked Theatre’s upcoming production of Spring Awakening, but I’ll venture that nothing else the company does this year will surpass its remount of Shakespeare’s R & J, playing now at Phoenix Theatre. The bare bones of Romeo and Juliet (interspersed with other Shakespearean verse) provide…
Hearing Actors Theatre managing director Erica McKibben Black tell Sunday’s matinee audience that the rest of this season is on was a lovely way to greet the new year. Though they fell just a smidge short of what they needed to raise by December 31, the company’s planning and restructuring…
The Phoenix Suns announced yesterday that they would welcome a group of “high energy” youngsters to their entertainment crew, and today they announced their double whammy — seniors. Dance Fusion, a group of 15 women ages 42 to 73 (who are self-described seniors), will also perform for Suns fans on Friday…
Before you start drooling over the possibility of another handful of toned, tanned, and semi-clothed dancers being added to the Suns’ popular entertainment lineup — allow the basketball team to introduce The SunDance Kids. Important to note: The group taking to the court this Friday will not be Butch Cassidy’s entourage…
Women tend to remember what they were wearing at life’s big moments. (Maybe men do, too.) It’s probably because some outfits are very carefully chosen, and because some events really carve in stone the memory of things like those million little buttons or cuffed ivory ankle boots or the skirt…
Editor’s note: This story has been altered from its original version. The Arizona Opera reports it’s holding steady, even in a difficult economic climate for the arts. Dmitri Hvorostovsky is to opera what David Beckham is to soccer. What Brad Pitt is to Hollywood. He’s the Lady Gaga of the…
Post-holiday blahs are so 2011. Look at the January calendar! So many interesting plays to see. Some of them are bound to take you by surprise. For example, learning that there’s a two-character musical based on the 1912 novel that inspired the Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs was not…
Though it’s been a wild, wonderful year of theatergoing, and the very best shows were better than ever, I found it unusually easy to narrow the best down to fewer than 20. For what that’s worth. Also, let’s acknowledge that we’re talking about live, ephemeral art here. Unfortunately, if you…
Not far from where I sit typing this, theater people are wringing their hands. That’s what I picture, anyway: The folks at Actors Theatre, pacing and moaning and occasionally stopping to grab the backs of their necks. This, our most interesting professional theater company, has only a few weeks to…
Wow, 2011’s nearly over. If you’re desperate to improve your tax situation, you have just a couple of days to decide how. How . . . about giving some money to the arts? (This does not constitute professional financial advice.) As we’ve been mentioning, some of the best theater companies…
We know you’re crazy busy this time of year, and so are local theater companies. With very few revivals of Curtains-approved holiday extravaganzas on the boards in 2011, we ran around and checked out as many of the current crop of offerings as we could.Here are three plays and a…
We know you’re crazy busy this time of year, and so are local theater companies. With very few revivals of Curtains-approved holiday extravaganzas on the boards in 2011, we ran around and checked out as many of the current crop of offerings as we could. Here are four plays running through the weekend…
Tape is only the second theater production at Tempe’s Venue 104, which, sadly, closes for good at the end of this month. The loss of the cafe/bar/gallery/theater/music venue is particularly sad because Michael Peck and company were doing such solid work and their dream (at least the part that featured…
It’s time, once again, to be amused, shocked, and educated into humility by adults playing characters who are children, so who better than Louis Farber, who played the title role in NewBrave Theatre’s Mr. Marmalade, to direct MilkMilkLemonade for Stray Cat Theatre? Every performer in this show is playing something…
Neil Hamburger’s set at Crescent Ballroom last night was precisely what the crowd wanted: The suited and combed-over comic (the alter ego of Gregg Turkington) went on a high-energy roll, churning through offensive pop culture jokes with unexpected, often shocking, punchlines, with plenty of mucousy throat clearing.”I’ve been diagnosed with…
I have to say right away that the heading above is a summary of the plot and theme of this play, not a critique of the acting in the current production of Lauren Marshall’s translation/adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope by the ASU School of Theatre and Film. The writing and…
It’s often possible to take a work of dramatic literature that’s simply dated — i.e., very much of the time when it was created, to the extent that it seems weird and awkward now — present it in a reverentially historically accurate setting, and help communicate the atmosphere or the…
There are other things to do this weekend besides shopping and decorating. In fact, it’s a great time to get out and see theater, between lots of locals being out of town and the rest of us maybe spending more time with our loved ones over a four-day period than…
Lately, it feels as though theater’s getting as insecure and vapid as some of the other arts: Everything has to be the first, the biggest, the funniest, the most shocking, or the most topical. Times are tough and competition is fierce, so I get that. But the door is now…
