We laughed, we cried, we fashion policed: Edward Prostak (Scrooge) and David Errigo Jr. (Christmas Past). Photo by Scott Samplin © 2008 I’ve brushed off my black trousers and Ugly Christmas Sweater one last time to review a production at a Broadway-style dinner theater (yes, that’s an oxymoron): the…
About three minutes into Stray Cat Theatre’s newest production, I found myself thinking: This can’t be really happening. When you go to see it — and you must, if you do nothing else this holiday season, go see this astonishing stage production — you will almost certainly experience the same…
Damon Dering (standing, center) plays Irish O’Flanagan in Times Square Angel in its Arizona premiere, presented by Nearly Naked Theatre. Photo by Nancy Lynn Miller. This week, Curtains flees gratefully back into the arms of the counterculture, but not far enough to avoid seeing another Christmas show. Charles Busch’s campy melodramedy…
Kelly Leeth and Fred Bornhoeft are adorable in Miracle on 34th Street. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and he was heard mildly cursing into his body mic during a quick backstage costume change last Saturday night in Peoria. But he shouldn’t feel bad. Seriously, actor Fred Bornhoeft…
Theater director Damon Dering has wanted to produce David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly for nearly two decades. He first fell in love with the play “sometime before 1991,” he tells us in his director’s notes for the production that his company, Nearly Naked Theatre, has recently unveiled. Dering has, he…
By Julie Peterson Mary Riley and Richard Baird in The Winter’s Tale. Photo by Laura Durant, graphic enhancements by Southwest Shakespeare Co. Watching a play by William Shakespeare can be like watching a biopic (or, for that matter, like trying to get on an O.J. Simpson jury) — you already know what…
By Julie Peterson Let’s lay some cards on the table, here: I’m not crazy about traditional, mid-century, Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-style musical theater. I’m also not crazy about more recent spectaculars like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s. It’s not that I think less of those genres; it’s just that musical theater has so many challenging…
The Lady with All the Answers is an agreeably entertaining character study in search of a story. Its direction by Samantha K. Wyer is faultless; its set, where we are left to visit Eppie Lederer (best known to you and me as the late, syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers), is…
In the whiny author’s notes printed in the program for Richard Dresser’s A View of the Harbor, the playwright carps about how hard it is to write plays. Because this commentary is punctuated with several sour jabs at theater critics, I was hoping I’d like his new play more than…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio appears in Anna Deavere Smith’s new play, but don’t ask her to tell you how he comes off. “He’s in there, that’s all I’m saying,” Smith says firmly. “You’ll just have to come to the production to see how he shows up.” Local theatergoers will be among…
Like most real-life marriages, Theater Artists Studio’s Marriage Play is lopsided. The company’s production of Edward Albee’s comic drama is expertly directed by Kathleen Butler, a chum and frequent collaborator of Albee’s who originated the female role in this play (a coup for TAS because smaller troupes rarely attract celeb…
To describe what makes Mark Schultz’s Everything Will Be Different such a magnificent piece of writing is to give away the tricks that are at the very core of its achievement. To simply detail its plot is to diminish this unique and perverse little play’s dark power. Fortunately, its Stray…
There’s no preaching in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, A Parable, which is set in a Catholic boys’ school in 1964. Its story concerns that ages-old tradition of priests molesting little boys, but its aim is to address not the various horrors of that issue, but rather the difference between what…
I had a subscription to TV Guide when I was a kid, and I remember looking forward each September to the magazine’s annual Fall Preview issue, in which the editors devoted a page to each of the new season’s network shows. Shows like Mr. T and Tina always sounded better…
Something hilarious happens within the first few minutes of Chyro Arts’ Dearly Departed: A woman, played by Jacqueline Gaston, reads a wickedly amusing letter to her husband, who suddenly falls over in a dead heap just after she finishes. It’s a moment that’s shocking and witty and holds a good…
I’m not a praying man. If I were, my prayers — especially those offered up after watching a performance of Nunsense, Amen at Desert Stages Theatre earlier this week — might sound something like this: “Deliver us, Lord, from funny nun musicals, especially those in which each of the characters…
It’s that time of the year again, when playhouses are mostly dark and pretend awards take the place of real entertainment. This, the fifth Robbie Awards, is a black-tie event, so strap on your imaginary evening wear and take your make-believe seat. And remember: No text-messaging during the boring bits…
I’m sorry. It was my intention to review Desert Stages’ production of South Pacific this week, but I’m afraid I was so distracted by the obnoxious teenager who talked and yawned and text-messaged her way through the show’s opening-night performance that I missed much of what was happening onstage. Desert…
It’s a theater critic’s job, as he enters a playhouse, to leave at the door any attitudes or preferences he may have about a particular genre of play. Therefore, I abandoned my ennui about camp in the lobby of Nearly Naked Theatre as I headed in to see what they’d…
My friend Michelle and I were the only white people in the audience at last week’s performance of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which made me all the more aware that I was a white man who doesn’t like poetry who’d come to watch…
I’ve seen Smokey Joe’s Café too many times over the past decade to have been very excited about attending Black Theatre Troupe’s current production last weekend. And as I sat in the Herberger Stage West, staring at Thom Gilseth’s shabbily constructed curtain drop, I thought, If the set design is…
Gross Indecency certainly lives up to its name. I was bored within three minutes of this play, subtitled The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, commencing. Renowned playwright Moises Kaufman has painstakingly Scotched together a seemingly endless litany of quotes, biographical sketches and transcripts from and about Wilde’s late-19th-century sodomy trials,…
