“Maria! I just met a girl named Maria/And suddenly that name will never be the same to me.” Her real name is Katherine Stewart, and she is the main reason to see the revival of West Side Story, currently stirring up the sleepy suburbs at Mesa Amphitheatre. West Side Story…
The Eureka! Theatre Company has shown itself to be a bastion of controlled-risk theatre. Founder and artistic director Evann Wilcosky has consistently produced top-quality productions of plays most theatres in the Valley won’t touch. Last season’s roster included Christopher Durang’s Baby With the Bathwater and one of the year’s best…
Godspell has been a source of both controversy and inspiration since its first production in 1971. It was written in reaction to a lethargic Anglican church. John-Michael Tebelak, then a drama student at Carnegie Tech’s School of Drama, created the musical as an attempt “to weave God’s spell over the…
Between relatively mundane courses, Copper State Dinner Theatre is serving up a delectable comedy called I Hate Hamlet. This amusing morsel had a colorful run on Broadway in 1991 for 80 performances, but is remembered mainly for the disgraceful behavior of Nicol Williamson. Playing the role of John Barrymore to…
Childsplay has begun its 19th season on a triumphant note with a stunningly imaginative production of The Secret Garden. This version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel is a new adaptation by Pamela Sterling, told in a straightforward narrative style that features a strong structure with a beginning, a middle…
Fife Symington’s partnership with Chicanos Por La Causa to build the Mercado retail and office center in downtown Phoenix was hailed by community leaders in 1986 as a visionary step that would help rekindle a deserted downtown. Nine years later, the Mercado sits nearly empty. Symington, now governor, has filed…
The most important theatre event of this decade, Tony Kushner’s epic masterpiece Angels in America, has arrived in Phoenix. It is the largest and deepest play since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? hit Broadway in 1962, and joins A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and A Long Day’s…
Theater Works is turning out its annual miracle: a great, bloated Broadway musical on a tiny stage in a barn. The occasion is its revival of Jerry Herman’s Mame, featuring 156 costumes and a sterling star turn. When the literati debate the virtues of Stephen Sondheim versus Andrew Lloyd Webber,…
After a vagabond year, changing location with each production, Phoenix Theatre is celebrating its 75th season in a newly refurbished home. The ample lobby, rest rooms and plush seats make the facility, renovated at a cost of $5 million, an attractive destination for an evening out. To christen the theatre’s…
Harold Pinter is arguably the most influential English dramatist in the second half of the 20th century. Traces of Pinter’s spare and oblique dialogue can be found in the works of Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Kopit, Sam Shepard, David Mamet and John Guare. Pinter spent the first ten years…
“I need a man!” screech female voices in the Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s classic tale of Spanish suppression, The House of Bernarda Alba. Since that sentiment suggests a solution rather simplistic for today’s women, one is left to ponder this play of sexual repression as…
Grand Canyon University has launched a promising season of Shakespeare with a scintillating production of Tom Stoppard’s contemporary classical romp Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The sensation of the 1967 season on Broadway–it won the New York Drama Critics’ and Tony awards for Best Play–Stoppard’s witty deconstruction of Hamlet ran…
The Diviners came to my attention by winning the prestigious American College Theatre Festival Award at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. I brought author James Leonard Jr. to New York to participate in the Circle Repertory Company Plays-in-Progress series that spring. Based on the success of that staged reading,…
This New York theatre season will be remembered as the year of the penises. The age of the gay play has arrived with a vengeance, and with an unprecedented display of genitalia. With five gay plays currently playing on New York stages, it is clear that repressing one’s behavior is…
There have been many versions of Victor Hugo’s classic melodrama The Hunchback of Notre Dame, several of them captured on film. Most memorable is the 1923 silent film starring “the man of a thousand faces,” the legendary Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. The hunchback received a voice in the brilliant 1939…
Last summer, Davis Productions gave us the wonderfully polished, Broadway-quality Pirates of Penzance. This summer’s offering, Bye, Bye Birdie, falls far short of last year’s benchmark production. From sets that resemble three-year-old high school flats to dance numbers that involve more standing around than dancing, this summer’s musical leaves you…
Probably the best argument that can be made for continuing federal funding for the arts is to consider what kind of entertainment would proliferate if market demands become the sole influence on artistic repertoire. One measure by which we might gauge expectations for the theatre is to gaze into a…
On March 31, 55 years ago, the golden age of the American musical was born. It is easy to imagine the shiver the audience must have experienced on that opening night, when the houselights went down and, without an overture, the curtain rose on a farmhouse and a windmill etched…
Forget Las Vegas! Fly over to Gammage Auditorium instead. You’ll lose your frequent-flier miles, but you’ll catch the most scintillating flash of flesh the law will allow. I’m speaking, of course, of that simple children’s Bible tale, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. If, like most of us, you’d love…
“The time has come to speak of love,” the Narrator solemnly tells us. “The lover and the beloved come from different countries. The curt truth is that in a deep, secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many; for the lover craves any possible relation with the…
A couple of things really pissed me off when I turned 50: It wasn’t enough that my junk mail started to include weekly solicitations to join AARP, I had to buy glasses from the drugstore to read them. If that didn’t make you smile, you probably won’t enjoy Ivan Menchell’s…
“Can Broadway be saved?” was the question on the cover of New York magazine last week. Inside, Michael Goldstein prescribed a 12-step program to restore the flagship of the American theatre to its former glory. First, he says, Broadway must admit it’s got a problem. If you were one of…
