The 2011 edition of the Phoenix Improv Festival will take place on April 15 and April 16, festival officials announced last week. The indie fest, which will be entering its tenth year, is produced and run by Bill Binder, a stalwart in Phoenix’s improv community. PIF (the hip kids pronounce…
Eventually, American theater will run out of 20th-century musical troubadours to venerate. In the meantime, there is Woody Guthrie’s American Song, a sort-of biography told in tunes and travelogues written by Guthrie himself. And though we may leave the playhouse knowing as little about Guthrie the folk singer as we…
Oh, 2010, how is it that you can have gone by so quickly, yet we can still be so glad to see you go? What I will miss, even though they’re already all a blur, are the many great shows the year brought — and even the dozens of just…
Theatre Artists Studio member and playwright Hal Corley is back with two women, two choices, and a whole lot of steamy drama. For the first time, the studio, at 4848 E. Cactus Road in Scottsdale, presents two of Corley’s plays, Suocera and Mama and Jack Carew, in repertory on alternating…
I long to take the month of December off from writing, so that I can focus on tree-trimming and card-making and other seasonal events. December deadlines are usually a nightmare, largely because printers keep such odd holiday schedules, and writing January copy the week before Christmas usually means I’m missing…
Secret’s out — Third Fridays are your best chance to see what you missed on First Friday, (plus a few extra openings) without so much shenanigan. And tonight is no exception. Here are seven must-sees if you’re out and about and looking for art. 1. GIG STIGMATA @ Trunk Space…
It took attending Learn to Be Latina with a very smart date (who often consumes journalism the day it appears) for Curtains to hear that not everyone thinks the latest from Stray Cat Theatre is about identity politics in any serious, up-to-the-minute way. In fact, this script, Stray Cat’s production,…
I long to take the month of December off from writing, so that I can focus on tree-trimming and card-making and other seasonal events. December deadlines are usually a nightmare, largely because printers keep such odd holiday schedules, and writing January copy the week before Christmas usually means I’m missing…
Last winter, I attended a holiday dance show — one of those Christmas-themed musical pageants where the stage is overtaken by crowds from one dance class after another, mostly prepubescents determined to slog through “Jingle Bell Rock” without forgetting a ball-change or bursting into tears. I really enjoyed this production,…
Space 55 Theatre Ensemble defies pinning down, even in the world of offbeat, tiny companies. The dump they perform in is nowhere near the neighborhoods that are alleged to be bohemian — it’s crammed between some faux loft apartments and ASU Downtown. The folks who run the place are super-multi-talented…
D. Scott Withers made me forget Divine. That’s not easy to do, and not just because I think rather often of the late cross-dressing actor who first played Edna Turnblad in John Waters’ Hairspray. Withers’ performance as Edna in Phoenix Theatre’s Hairspray: The Musical was an entirely new creation, one…
Take note, local weirdos: The priority deadline for 2011 Phoenix Fringe Festival applicants is 10 days from now. PHX:fringe 2011, as its otherwise known, is looking for theater, dance, and performance art peeps to take part in the shebang scheduled to take place from April 1 through April 10. Applications…
Not all children’s shows are grippingly entertaining for grownups, but their audiences always are. Careful eavesdropping on the moppets who attend Childsplay’s Junie B. in Jingle Bells, Batman Smells! will take you back to your own days of wonder and excitement. “Whoa! It’s her school!” exclaimed one girl, when she…
When the Phoenix Center for the Arts partnered up with ASU Downtown’s School of Public Affairs and the Phoenix Center Association, we knew things were about to get seriously creative — and educational. Together, they’re sponsoring the Rise Project, an 8-week, after-school program in urban performing arts. Classes will be…
Film critic Leonard Maltin coined the term Mumbo-Jumbo Quotient (MJQ) in his capsule review of The Matrix, and it comes in handy as a way to describe art that’s so freaking weird that some other element ideally needs to cross into the red zone as well, to balance the weirdness…
“You don’t sing to feel better,” actress Jevetta Steele says at one point in her electrifying lead performance in Arizona Theater Company’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. “You sing because it’s a way of understanding life.” August Wilson understands life. There’s rich, musical proof in the hopeful, often anguished portraits he…
Actor and comedian Dane Cook’s been in movies alongside the likes of Steve Carrell (Dan in Real Life) and Kevin Costner (Mr. Brooks), he’s hosted Saturday Night Live twice, and had a hit comedy album, Retaliation. Now, he’s on tour, and he’ll be bringing his brand of observational humor to…
All living beings deserve respect. On the other hand, if you’re famous and take advantage of it to have a ridiculously bad book published, put on your big-girl panties, because people will make fun of your book and you don’t need to take it personally. That’s what happens during Celebrity…
The inside of the Galvin Playhouse at ASU Tempe smells just awful, like a huge malfunctioning bathroom. (Like sewage, but in a domesticated way — I don’t want to make it sound even worse than it is.) If I were an investigative reporter, I’d try to find out why and…
The Arizona Women’s Theatre Company has supported women playwrights since 2003 and returns this weekend with its annual Pandora Festival — an opportunity for women writers to showcase their full-length, one-act, or 10-minute creations. This year, AWTC is adding a twist. The theatre company will host a Pandora Showcase –…
It turns out that one can, in fact, have too much of a good thing. Witness Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), Actors Theatre’s season opener at the Herberger. This gorgeous, neatly acted production is flawed not in its execution, but in its over-long script, which…
