It’s always a heartwarming surprise to see a play by a non-famous local writer — a student, recent grad, or someone just relatively new to writing for the stage — and have it turn out to be well-crafted and entertaining. I love new artists, and I love the companies who…
The irony in the failure of Stray Cat Theatre’s current production of Speech & Debate is that it falls short largely because its lead actors are so adept at playing infuriating teenagers. After close to two hours of hand-wringing and anguish from Stephen Karam’s trio of peculiar pubescents, their audience…
It’s time for Christmas shows! Nearly Naked’s Times Square Angel, Arizona Broadway Theatre’s A Christmas Carol, and Theater Works’ Miracle on 34th Street are all back with many of the same cast, designers, and directors as last year. (Check with each company for this year’s dates and times.) Fred Bornhoeft, who was reprising…
After just about a year of seeing a play a week for this column, I’m starting to catch some of the same fabulous performers over and over again, working in different companies for different directors, and realize why they get cast a lot. Choosing the cast for a play is…
Many of our favorite stories are love stories, or at least have love stories in them — the thrill of new relationships, the steam of lust, the warm comfort of a lifelong, mutual romance — but relatively few novels, plays, or movies are about love. The phenomenon. The indefinable but undeniable condition that…
Oh, dear. And I was so looking forward to seeing Elaine May’s new comedy, too. Most of the rest of you — those of you unfortunate enough to have gone to see this dismal flop at Arizona Theater Company earlier this week or last —were probably more interested in seeing…
Is the Phantom of the Opera a ghost with supernatural powers, or is he just your typical freaky, deformed cellar-dweller who skulks around the opera house playing scary, steampunky tricks to manipulate the management into doing his bidding? That’s just one of the details I shouldn’t reveal to anyone who’s never seen the Andrew Lloyd…
Last summer, I took advantage of time alone in a friend’s lovely Seattle home to curl up and read several books from his home library, including Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The Happiness Myth. It looks at how modern life stresses and drains us and identifies five tried-and-true historic aspects of human…
The Smell of the Kill is an awful name for a play, especially one as smartly written as Michele Lowe’s tart black comedy, now on display at Algonquin Theater in Peoria. The story concerns three 21st-century wives stuck in pre-feminist marriages; each has a husband who’s lacking in some real…
Scotty Jeffers, a talented and popular Valley actor and musician who’d graced our stages continuously ever since his Washington High School days, died suddenly Saturday night, October 31, at the age of 38, from what friends were told was cardiac arrest triggered by a pulmonary embolism. He had just completed…
A new educational performance company is in town, scaring your kids and introducing them to actual literature. And they are kicking ass at it, based on the public performances of Poe that Arizona Curriculum Theater is currently presenting at Soul Invictus. (The Emily Dickinson programming in their catalog might not be as…
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s creationist comedy about the end of the world is, excuse the pun, built for disaster. Apocalyptic commentaries on theories of evolution tend not to go over big, and Boom is as funny as it is smart — always a dangerous combination when one is attempting to entertain…
Tap-dancing has become kind of a specialty thing, though maybe I’m the only person who ever found it mainstream. Anyway, you don’t see tap numbers frequently, and sometimes when you do see one, the shoes don’t all have taps on them and the orchestra plays really loud so you can’t…
Last week, we talked about Curtains (the musical mystery) here in Curtains (the online theater review column at PHXmusic.com). In another of those crazy coincidences, this week’s review is of another thriller (but without songs) by one of Curtains’ (the play’s) several authors, Rupert Holmes, who was, for decades, best known for writing…
The Kite Runner has finally received the adaptation it deserves. Its Arizona Theater Company production, now flying high at the Herberger, trumps the inferior 2007 film version of Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling novel, thanks to a faithful translation by playwright Matthew Spangler and graceful direction by ATC’s artist director David Ira…
Laura Durant Rusty Ferracane plays Cioffi in Curtains. If this is your first visit to this particular blog feature, I should probably point out that it’s always called “Curtains” — we thought it was a cool name for a theater review column — but this week the play I saw is also called…
It’s always been rough to be a teenager (or to know one), but up until about 50 years ago, you could count on going to war, marrying young, and/or working your butt off for a living to distract you from hormonal storms, existential angst, and the cruel disappointment of finding…
David Vining is many things: theater director, dialect coach, university professor. In Stray Cat Theater’s new production of Blackbird, Vining reminds us that he’s also a fine actor. His rather estimable job in this one-act, written by David Harrower and directed by Stray Cat founder Ron May, is to create…
One of my favorite “little musicals” ever, ever, ever is Oil City Symphony. I could eat eggplant Parmigiana and watch that show for five, six days in a row and not need another diversion. You don’t see Oil City produced a lot these days, maybe partly because the four original cast members all…
No one really doubts that professional entertainers are as maddeningly human as the rest of us. Nevertheless, the nostalgic farces of contemporary playwright Ken Ludwig mine comic gold from pondering that mystery. Typically, two groups of characters bump both literally and figuratively into each other: talented, worn-out, disillusioned “stars” and…
If, as the saying goes, no news is good news, then this year’s theater season is nothing but good news. Great news, in fact, for those of us who don’t like our plays and musicals to do much of anything new or different. Magnificent news for anyone worried that local…
The theater season has officially begun in our little cultural sweatbox, and that means more of the musicals have live orchestras again. This is great news, and it makes Theater Works’ current production of Camelot just that much less dreary. The score has great, popular, memorable songs that audience members…
