I have seen Theatre Artists Studio’s Lenin’s Embalmers, and, oh, the wisecracks I could make about dead comedies and performances by walking corpses. I’ll refrain. But I will say this: I can’t imagine who could make this tedious black comedy shine. At just under two hours, it’s a full 90…
Here we are, smack in the middle of PHX:fringe, with just three days to go. So many shows; such a plethora of choices! Curtains wishes Big Blue or Watson could have plotted out what showed promise, what coincided with Curtains’ uncommitted time, what allowed time to write about it for…
Two things you have to know right away: Tonight, Thursday, April 7, student tickets to Octopus are $10 with ID. (!!!) And Friday and Saturday nights, April 8 and 9, playwright Steve Yockey will be in town and at the theater for a post-Octopus discussion with director Ron May and…
Most of the kidnapping Arizona’s famous for is the imprisonment and torture of undocumented immigrants held hostage by smugglers who attempt to extort additional payment from loved ones, or by other gangs who kidnap them from their original coyote. Similar (and often more deadly) situations face Central Americans who cross…
In our world of choreographed flash mobs and revolution-by-Twitter, it may seem odd that an arts festival takes time to grow and develop over the years. But it does. Ideas lead to plans lead to experience leads to word of mouth, which generates new plans and experiences, until something reaches…
Downtown’s Space 55 has been home to local actors and has provided a space for local and traveling theatre for four years. The space, on Seventh and Pierce streets, is known for popular performances including “7 Minutes in …” and world premieres of Denny Guge’s “A Bloody Mary Christmas” and…
If you’re available to really immerse yourself in this year’s PHX:fringe Festival, starting Friday, April 1, a bicycle might be the way to go, one’s mobility permitting. No performance venue is far from the Roosevelt-to-McDowell corridor, between Seventh Street and 13th Avenue, and it’s getting too warm out to sprint…
Grey Gardens: The Musical is not for everyone. One’s ability to truly enjoy this camp musical depends on one’s knowledge of (and affection for) the documentary on which it’s based, and in how well the leading ladies impersonate the famous recluses at the center of its story. Fortunately for Tempe…
Arthur Schnitzler was both a doctor and a playwright (as was Anton Chekhov) in turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna. His play Reigen, most commonly known as La Ronde, is about a lot of things, but it’s partly about how easy it is to spread syphilis.Demonstrating that lesson involves a lot of sexual promiscuity,…
Last Thursday night, shortly before the curtain rose on Arizona Theatre Company’s Sex and the Second City Version 2.0, a young woman approached me and the three other theater critics with whom I was chatting in the lobby. “Excuse me,” she said, waving a camera at us. “Do you mind…
Even though Curtains is a Woman of a Certain Age, productions meant for W. of a C. A. have left me almost violently unsatisfied, sort of like being trapped in a timeshare presentation in which the salesperson claims that it will become nearly impossible to go wherever I please with…
A Raisin in the Sun tells the story of fictional Walter Lee Younger, a black man in 1950s Chicago who represents the social transition of black men and women during the middle of the last century. As he grapples with taking his place in American society and as the head…
Massive theater geek that I am, no one had to tell me twice to attend Arizona Theatre Company’s newly commissioned unknown quantity, Ten Chimneys, once I’d learned it’s about Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the renowned golden couple of the 20th-century stage, retreating to their summer place in Wisconsin to…
This Sunday, Conspire will die … but only for a few hours while its collective crew gives the place a much-needed paint job and symbolically changes the locks.Founding member Joey G. says he hopes the “funeral” will help get rid of the place’s “stifling negative energy.” (He later explains the…
When faced with a dinner theater version of My Fair Lady, the least a theater critic can be is…well, fair. Such is the case in this week’s “Stage” column in which Robrt L. Pela recounts his experience with Arizona Broadway Theatre’s version of Lady. Robrt L. Pela on Arizona Broadway…
Dearest Dear, I’m writing to apologize for having taken you to a dinner theater production of My Fair Lady. To be fair, you did agree to go with me to Arizona Broadway Theatre. And we were both excited to see Jeannie Shubitz in the lead — that’s why we were…
When playwright Greg Kotis was here a few weeks ago, he theorized that his script Eat the Taste — in which a playwright is kidnapped by mysterious operatives and urged to write a one-man Broadway show about and starring former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft — is not produced particularly…
Last night, Philthy Phil’s announced its last of last calls. After more than eight years in business, the favorite neighborhood dive bar on 16th Street closed for good due to “unforeseen circumstances.”The bar got a face lift more than a year ago with the help of Craig Citizen and a…
“Shredding. Bathroom. Office. Doctor. Fart.” Those are some of the notes I made after seeing The Unhappiness Plays, a perfectly unique evening of short and short-short plays by Tony-winner Greg Kotis, author of Eat the Taste (which he claims has been produced only in Phoenix and Australia — so, you…
A few years back, Ron May directed [sic], a slightly twisted domestic comedy by Canadian Melissa James Gibson, at Stray Cat Theatre (where he’s also artistic director). The ensemble acquitted themselves respectably, the writing showed a bit more promise than the usual tale of single, dysfunctional, apartment-dwelling Manhattanites, but I…
The Phoenix Art Museum will soon be showing more than just a few documentaries and classical films — they’re bringing in a live theater. The museum recently joined up with National Theatre Live and the Arizona Theater Company to bring broadcast performances of Broadway musicals and powerful plays to museum…
The trouble with Mama and Jack Carew is that there’s so very much of it. Hal Corley’s full-length play, at least as presented by Theatre Artists Studio, is too long by a good 90 minutes. Its sluggish 2½ hours unfold as slowly as a dental exam; its underwhelming lead male…
