There are rich rewards in even the most routine presentation of Tennessee Williams’ 1944 classic The Glass Menagerie. Phoenix Theatre’s production of Williams’ autobiographical drama is proof that almost nothing can dim this story’s enduring appeal. Williams’ timeless people — the Southern belles and gentleman callers of the playwright’s own…
Fully Committed is a play about conversations: Truncated, maddening, sometimes amusing conversations — the kind we all have every day with total strangers we’d probably rather not be talking to in the first place. The difference here is that the conversations are all held by one person, an actor in…
It’s little wonder that Nearly Naked Theatre’s Damon Dering has wanted to produce The King of Infinite Space for more than a decade. Andrew Ordover’s obscure morality play is a satisfying, compelling piece of writing with more dramatic turns than a week’s worth of made-for-TV movies. In the director’s notes,…
It’s Tuesday, and I’m standing outside City Hall, lying to strangers. “I’m going to the Lunch Time Theater program at the Herberger,” I tell a dozen different people. “But I don’t know where the Herberger is.” I’m trying to determine whether people who work in downtown Phoenix know that they…
It was a Sinatra crowd that took their seats last Friday night at Phoenix Theatre for a second-week performance of My Way, a tribute to the Chairman of the Board that’s been doing boffo box office. The program crams 56 Frank Sinatra songs into a handsomely produced, gracefully entertaining two-hour…
From the moment one enters Stage West at the Herberger, Black Theatre Troupe’s production of The Gospel at Colonus grabs one’s coattails and hangs on ’til the final hosanna. Pulling off a flawless production of The Gospel at Colonus — which fuses Greek theater with Pentecostal oratory and West African,…
The barrio boys of Culture Clash’s The Mission wanna give it up for Latino culture. If only someone will let them. The ersatz Culture Clash now appearing at Scottsdale’s Metro Theatre is actually the cast of Teatro Bravo’s retread of the famous group’s breakout play, but it’s selling the same…
Where the Big Apple is concerned, Laurie Anderson’s work has often had an eerie prescience about it. In an Encyclopedia Britannica essay on New York City she authored last summer, Anderson speculated about how far the World Trade Center towers would fall if they collapsed. (The encyclopedia’s editors opted to…
Actors Theatre of Phoenix has taken another artistic risk that pays off in spite of itself. The company’s production of actor/author John Leguizamo’s Spic-O-Rama succeeds mostly as a showcase for the talents of local actor Richard Trujillo, whose superb performance as six different members of one familia loca busts past…
Frank Kopyc’s performance as Eliza Doolittle’s loutish father is one of many treats in Arizona Theater Company’s production of My Fair Lady. His rousing “With a Little Bit of Luck” and comical “Get Me to the Church on Time” are both showstoppers, played with such joyous oomph that it’s almost…
Lest I be mistaken for a holiday-hating Scrooge, I’ll open by mentioning that I’m writing this theater review surrounded by Christmas trees — three of them, all mine, and each trimmed to sagging by myself and my beloved, while we drank eggnog and ate wreath-shaped cookies and listened to The…
Some weeks my job is less about offering opinions about theater than it is about dodging Neil Simon comedies. This week I failed to completely avoid my least favorite playwright, because the only shows opening here last Friday were both written by Simon. I considered attending Stagebrush Theatre’s production of…
In 1978, I received an F on a high school English composition in which I wrote that the characters in the film Rebel Without a Cause were all losers. John, I wrote, was a babyish invert, too stupid to hide his crush on Jim, a loser whose idea of fun…
Whenever folks gripe about the dreary state of theater in our town — which happens as often as you’d imagine — I always point out that stage legends live and work here every day. I’m especially boastful about the fact that theater luminary Marshall Mason teaches at the local university,…
Despite its somewhat labored Actors Theatre of Phoenix production, there’s plenty to recommend Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. There’s the richness of its writing, the allure of its subject, and the astonishing range of emotions its people endure. This is the kind of play that used to be dubbed “a…
There’s an unfortunate timeliness to Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, with its deadly attacks on America and its evacuation of New York City. It doesn’t take much effort to find parallels between the catastrophes of September 11 and the infamous 1938 radio broadcast, with its…
Just before the curtain goes up on each of Black Theatre Troupe’s productions, executive director David J. Hemphill makes a gracious speech in which he thanks the company’s subscribers and supporters. Hemphill always ends his speech by saying, “If you enjoy the show tonight, tell all your friends. If you…
An amazing thing happens a few minutes into 2 Pianos, 4 Hands: After the show’s co-stars, both of whom are seated at glossy grand pianos, have performed a complicated duet, one of them begins banging on the keyboard in a perfect imitation of a tiny child — a character he…
T he truest test of any great piece of theater — or any drama whose title is routinely appended with a superlative, has been produced for years on Broadway to great critical acclaim, or been handed any kind of trophy — is to release it for public performance. Dropped onto…
Nothing, not even the threat of world war, can discourage Phoenix Theatre’s annual tradition of kicking off the season with a big, tacky musical. This year, it’s Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s perfectly terrible Applause, which won the 1970 Tony Award for Best Musical entirely on the strength of its…
The silence from experimental theater lately has been deafening. Since the dissolution of oddball Planet Earth Theatre last year, there’s been almost nothing out of the ordinary — save the occasional offbeat translation by teeny Nearly Naked Theatre — happening on local stages. But there’s hope for those who want…
In Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, a little girl destroys her teacher’s life with accusations that the teacher is gay. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, mere mortals are tried and convicted as witches by their peers. In the best theatrical tradition, recent behind-the-scenes shenanigans at local companies have combined…
