Something funny is in the air. Make that 13 things. This fall we’re finding you the best ways to bust a gut with stand-up specials happening all around the Valley. Whether they’re old-school-style stand-up artists or up-and-coming comedians, here are performances you oughta mark on your calendar…
If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to show off your new dance moves, this might just be your chance. The eighth annual Breaking Ground Festival is set to take place Friday and Saturday, March 20 and 21, at Tempe Center for the Arts. Though the show is still quite…
T.J. Miller might be best known as Erlich Bachman from the HBO television show Silicon Valley, or for his movie roles, like his supporting role in She’s Out of My League or “getting yelled at by Michael Bay on the set of Transformers,” but there’s much more to him than…
Paul Mecurio likes to keep his plate full. At present, the mergers and acquisitions lawyer turned comedian writes for the Daily Show With Jon Stewart — a gig he’s had for more than a decade that’s earned him an Emmy and a Peabody Award. He produces his own podcast, The…
There are a lot of rising stars in the comedy world right now, and it seems stand-up is in something of a golden age. Even sitcoms, for the most part, have done away with the laugh tracks and traded the sexy Hollywood stars and starlets for professionals in the art…
Vera Stark is, like so many actresses who start out hungry and wind up legendary, alone on her own stage. She works alongside other actors only because she needs someone to talk to, but none — in her estimation, and in ours — are her equals. Vera is a fictional…
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. And no one knows this better than Tom Cotter. The New York comedian came in second to a troupe of dancing dogs on the seventh season of ABC’s America’s Got Talent. Since then, he’s been riding out his runner-up success, restocking his arsenal of…
Jamie Kilstein is making his voice heard. The progressive left-wing comedian can be found sharing his thoughts on war, abortion, gun control, rape culture, religion, veganism, and mainstream media coverage on stage at New York comedy clubs, on his comedy album, What Alive People Do, on his political podcast with…
Put on your dancing shoes, Phoenix. The Emmy Award-winning Fox show So You Think You Can Dance is following up its 11th season with a North American tour. The So You Think You Can Dance Tour 2014 will visit more than 70 cities across the United States, kicking off Wednesday,…
One attends a community theater production of Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues hoping to see pleasant performances and, if you’re a Simon fan, expecting to have a few laughs. One does not go expecting a powerhouse performance by a principal player — a performance so thrilling that it completely overshadows the…
The setup: Orange Theatre’s industrially flavored, iconoclastic mounting of Lorca’s Blood Wedding is similar in many ways to the roughly two-thirds complete work-in-progress version we got to see last winter. The company develops a play in several periods spanning about a year, and viewing multiple iterations reveals some of the…
Omar Delgado Macias’ career as a b-boy dancer has taken him a few place. As a matter of fact, the performer known as “RoxRite” has battled and busted out his slick moves and fancy footwork on six different continents and in dozens of cities around the globe, such as Tokyo,…
Time to shake what your mama gave you. The Phoenix Suns Dancers are hosting an open auditions on Saturday, August 9, for the 2014-15 season. Leading up to the auditions, the Suns Dancers will host a series of optional but highly recommended prep classes to teach interested performers a variety…
Summer is not yet half over, and we are hot and tired and want a chilled beverage. If we must be entertained, we want simple amusements, please, Beckett can wait until November. Actors Theatre — poor, beleaguered, recently almost-dead Actors Theatre — has delivered what we need. This professional theater…
Arizona Theatre Company announced on Monday, July 7, that Kristiana Colón is the winner of its 2014 Latino Playwriting Award for her original work Octagon. Based in Chicago, Colón is a playwright, poet, education, and member of Teatro Luna. She appeared on the fifth season of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam…
Over his career, self-proclaimed “natural-born freak” Rush Hicks has performed or trained with the Coney Island Sideshow and Squidling Brother Circus, placing him among the elite of the world’s circus and sideshow performers. In the past year alone, Hicks has logged almost 15,000 miles of travel all over the world…
Comedian and author Annabelle Gurwitch has a habit of turning the negative into positive — or, at the very least, a lucrative book deal. When Woody Allen fired her from the cast of his off-Broadway New York production, Writers Block, in 2003, she created Fired, a collection of essays about…
The setup: Space 55’s Late Night Series is a thing we’ve visited and written about before. It’s alternative performance for (eventually) every taste, something we both enjoy and pine for more of. This month, Saturday nights at 9 p.m. bring us 7 Minutes in Heaven, a thing that link kind…
The Phoenix-based web seriesVoyage Trekkers is looking to boldly go where no Arizona sci-fi web series has gone before: the silver screen. After doing two seasons of their “comedic love letter to Star Trek,” creators Nathan Blackwell and Craig Michael Curtis have their sights set on making a feature film…
Patent trolls be damned, The Adam Carolla Show must go on. Former host of The Man Show and the Crank Yanker himself, Adam Carolla will bring his podcast, The Adam Carolla Show to Phoenix’s Stand Up Live on Friday, June 20, and Saturday, June 21, with two shows per night…
“Really, to me, the whole thing is about building a storytelling scene.” These are the words of Dan Hull, architect of the downtown Phoenix storytelling scene. After two seasons of the weekly Yarnball storytelling open mic night at Lawn Gnome Publishing, and one season of the monthly Storyline feature at…
The setup: There really isn’t anything wrong with the lemons God gave you, even before you pluckily make lemonade from them. But in 1997, when director Peter Cattaneo showed us the work of screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) in The…
