While everyone in town is wetting their pants over the new Mesa Arts Center, the truly exciting news in local theater this week is taking place in a much less glamorous location. Wedged into the rehearsal space behind the main stage at the Herberger Theater Center, iTheatre Collaborative’s production of…
I was baffled when Nearly Naked Theatre announced earlier this year that it planned to open its season with Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room. McPherson’s dramedy tells a story that, despite some gallows humor and a better-than-competent script, isn’t more challenging than your average Lifetime Movie of the Week. The play’s…
One can only guess at what the new theater season holds. And because speculating about theater, at least in Phoenix, is often more entertaining than actually looking at it, here’s a list of facts and likely figures about where we’re at and what’s to come. Number of producing theater companies…
It will take the average reader about three minutes to read this newspaper column in which I, a person who is paid to share my opinion, will reveal the ways in which Black, White and Read All Over is a play totally lacking in substance and utterly devoid of entertainment…
Before I tell you why and how very much I hated Theater League’s The Wonder Bread Years, allow me to explain that this is a show I was born to love. I am the audience for this nostalgic gander at life as a boomer-era kid, one of those poor saps…
Plenty of things piss me off. Bad grammar. Ugly architecture. Friends who let their dog hump my leg. Weather. People. But the item at the very top of the list of Things That Make Me Want to Kill Myself With an Ax is a simple phrase, one that everyone in…
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is exactly the kind of entertainment I deplore: a corporate-inspired translation of a cutie-pie musical cartoon adapted from classic literature. It’s peopled by actors dressed in character costumes that all but swallow their performances, which are anyway built on attempts to ape the motion picture…
We’re a town lousy with theater awards: the ariZonis, the Scotties, the Milties and the Tilties. Chris Page at the Tribune has his Spotlight Awards, and even Mark Turvin hands out something called The Fishy Awards, which sounds sort of — well, you can finish that thought yourself, can’t you?…
I won’t add my voice to the cacophony of complaints about the gratuitous nudity forever on display at Nearly Naked Theatre, in part because I don’t care, but also because it’s bad form to bitch that the players are undraped when we’ve been warned ahead of time. The name of…
High on the list of life’s great mysteries, way up near “Why do we wait until a pig is dead to cure it?” and “Why do women sometimes shave off their eyebrows and then draw them back on?” is this one: “Why does dinner theater always suck so bad?” On…
Last Wednesday night, while the rest of America was watching Bo and Carrie duke it out in the final hour of American Idol, I was watching a room full of singers on a different stage. And thinking that maybe I’ve been watching too much television lately, because Phoenix Theatre’s production…
Two women kiss on a deserted Manhattan street, and the consequences of that kiss change their lives forever. Diana Son’s Stop Kiss burnishes a brief moment in the lives of ordinary people, making it memorable with smart dialogue and familiar personalities. And Stray Cat Theatre once again rises to the…
It happened again the other day. I was asked what I do for a living and, when I confessed that I’m a theater critic, I got the same response I’ve been getting for years. “Is there enough theater in Phoenix for you to cover?” That’s the polite version. I’ve also…
Gifted playwright alert: Donald Margulies is in town, or at least one of his better plays is, in time to help wind up what’s turned out to be a mediocre season and to remind us of what we’d have lost if the troubled Actors Theatre had succumbed to its recent…
I love hate mail. Next to the envelope that arrives at my home each week filled with what screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz once called “the most restful shade of green,” getting hate mail is the best part of my job. I’m nuts for letters written by angry actors whose work I’ve…
It’s the bane of my existence, a hideous blight to which I’ve been witness countless times, a painful bore that causes me to shrink in my theater seat each time it waggles its ugly theatrical head. Audience participation gives me gas. It ruins any play, lovely or ugly, and destroys…
I knew it was going to be a long night when Koko! The Island Adventures of Miss Koko Neufchatel began with the show’s lone actor dragging a couple of audience members onto the stage to wish them happy birthday. Note to local directors: Theater is not Chuck E. Cheese’s, and…
I hate Shakespeare. I always have. And you — if you’re unfortunate enough to have slogged through one of his interminable plays (or worse, a film adaptation of same) — probably hate him, too. That is, unless you’re a snooty dilettante who’s allowed himself to be convinced that every couplet…
Childsplay’s Romeo and Juliet is not just for kids. Thanks to crafty staging and a talented cast, all of them able to play persuasively any age or gender, it’s an edifying and even entertaining production of this oft-told love story. At a Sunday matinee populated mostly by underdressed tweens, I…
Whenever I find myself trapped in a theater with another lousy production of another dreary play or musical, I always turn to my friend the playbill. I’ve destroyed my eyesight peering into the dark at these marvels of bad syntax and questionable grammar, but it’s been worth it. Because playbills…
Molly Sweeney is blind. And she’s married to a windbag, a dorky bore who’s convinced her to undergo surgery to restore her eyesight. She’s lived a full, happy life in her native Ireland — at least until her meddlesome husband takes her on as his latest cause. The operation restores…
Imagine for a moment that you’re at a diner, and you’ve just ordered one of those “man-size” breakfast combos, the kind that come with four eggs and three kinds of meat and griddle cakes and a side of hash browns and a little plate of toast. In the space of…
