Before you start drooling over the possibility of another handful of toned, tanned, and semi-clothed dancers being added to the Suns’ popular entertainment lineup — allow the basketball team to introduce The SunDance Kids. Important to note: The group taking to the court this Friday will not be Butch Cassidy’s entourage…
Women tend to remember what they were wearing at life’s big moments. (Maybe men do, too.) It’s probably because some outfits are very carefully chosen, and because some events really carve in stone the memory of things like those million little buttons or cuffed ivory ankle boots or the skirt…
Editor’s note: This story has been altered from its original version. The Arizona Opera reports it’s holding steady, even in a difficult economic climate for the arts. Dmitri Hvorostovsky is to opera what David Beckham is to soccer. What Brad Pitt is to Hollywood. He’s the Lady Gaga of the…
Post-holiday blahs are so 2011. Look at the January calendar! So many interesting plays to see. Some of them are bound to take you by surprise. For example, learning that there’s a two-character musical based on the 1912 novel that inspired the Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs was not…
Though it’s been a wild, wonderful year of theatergoing, and the very best shows were better than ever, I found it unusually easy to narrow the best down to fewer than 20. For what that’s worth. Also, let’s acknowledge that we’re talking about live, ephemeral art here. Unfortunately, if you…
Not far from where I sit typing this, theater people are wringing their hands. That’s what I picture, anyway: The folks at Actors Theatre, pacing and moaning and occasionally stopping to grab the backs of their necks. This, our most interesting professional theater company, has only a few weeks to…
Wow, 2011’s nearly over. If you’re desperate to improve your tax situation, you have just a couple of days to decide how. How . . . about giving some money to the arts? (This does not constitute professional financial advice.) As we’ve been mentioning, some of the best theater companies…
We know you’re crazy busy this time of year, and so are local theater companies. With very few revivals of Curtains-approved holiday extravaganzas on the boards in 2011, we ran around and checked out as many of the current crop of offerings as we could.Here are three plays and a…
We know you’re crazy busy this time of year, and so are local theater companies. With very few revivals of Curtains-approved holiday extravaganzas on the boards in 2011, we ran around and checked out as many of the current crop of offerings as we could. Here are four plays running through the weekend…
Tape is only the second theater production at Tempe’s Venue 104, which, sadly, closes for good at the end of this month. The loss of the cafe/bar/gallery/theater/music venue is particularly sad because Michael Peck and company were doing such solid work and their dream (at least the part that featured…
It’s time, once again, to be amused, shocked, and educated into humility by adults playing characters who are children, so who better than Louis Farber, who played the title role in NewBrave Theatre’s Mr. Marmalade, to direct MilkMilkLemonade for Stray Cat Theatre? Every performer in this show is playing something…
Neil Hamburger’s set at Crescent Ballroom last night was precisely what the crowd wanted: The suited and combed-over comic (the alter ego of Gregg Turkington) went on a high-energy roll, churning through offensive pop culture jokes with unexpected, often shocking, punchlines, with plenty of mucousy throat clearing.”I’ve been diagnosed with…
I have to say right away that the heading above is a summary of the plot and theme of this play, not a critique of the acting in the current production of Lauren Marshall’s translation/adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope by the ASU School of Theatre and Film. The writing and…
It’s often possible to take a work of dramatic literature that’s simply dated — i.e., very much of the time when it was created, to the extent that it seems weird and awkward now — present it in a reverentially historically accurate setting, and help communicate the atmosphere or the…
There are other things to do this weekend besides shopping and decorating. In fact, it’s a great time to get out and see theater, between lots of locals being out of town and the rest of us maybe spending more time with our loved ones over a four-day period than…
Lately, it feels as though theater’s getting as insecure and vapid as some of the other arts: Everything has to be the first, the biggest, the funniest, the most shocking, or the most topical. Times are tough and competition is fierce, so I get that. But the door is now…
I like to think that after a night of being raunchy and transgressive, the sketch writer/performers of Th [sic] Sense troupe curl up by the fireside in Grammy’s old quilt with some hot cocoa and fluffy kittens to read old fairy tales. And it makes them feel naughty. Curtains has…
A year later, Space 55’s Kim Porter says one of the theater’s most sucessful fundraisers includes a lineup of returning performers and a couple of new faces. This Friday and Saturday night, Porter, as well as Lou Clark, Tawni Waters, Genevieve Rice, Dilcia Yanez, Leslie Barton and Sativa Peterson (who, full disclosure, are…
Tolstoy was right: It’s more fun watching people be miserable. And so we have David Mamet, the American playwright who has brought us the delightful anguish of Oleanna (in which a young woman accuses her professor of sexual harassment) and the stunning treachery of Glengarry Glen Ross (about disreputable realtors…
Okay, so it was on the Cracked website, but nevertheless, science is discovering that reason is as specious and arbitrary as anything else created by the human mind. It’s a set of rules we pulled out of our asses to be able to win arguments, because winning arguments is a…
Dancers and instructors, as well as fans and arts community members will host a party, dubbed Meet Me at the Barre, to introduce the new space and to discuss upcoming performances and the future of dance in the Valley. …
Oh, these troubled times–especially for the arts community, always the first to be cut loose in any kind of economic crunch. The latest arts organization to fall apart is Actors Theatre, one of a handful of professional theater companies here. The Herberger Theater Center resident, which launched its 26th season…
