“Comedy workshop,” said the marquee outside the Tempe Improv. The comedian working in the shop wasn’t named, but the crowd was lined up hours before showtime even so. The Unknown Comic it wasn’t. No, 13 years after he christened the venue, Jerry Seinfeld, quite probably the biggest star in American…
If fame is fleeting, it also has its own geography. While New York types and theater buffs the world over revere Stephen Schwartz as a superstar, much of the rest of the world has never heard of him. Although he’s among the most successful composers working today, and despite a…
It is, one might argue, the original Spaghetti Western. Especially considering that it’s the work’s Arizona Opera première, the company’s current staging of La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) is an irony-rich experience — sitting in Tucson, the heart of six-shooter country, listening to cowboy-hatted lawmen…
Deep in the heart of Scottsdale, tucked into a forgotten strip mall, tiny Metro Theatre — home to the often brilliant but financially troubled Ensemble Theatre — is bustling tonight. While Ensemble shows generally play to half-empty houses, this second-night performance is teeming, its capacity crowd spilling onto the makeshift…
When I first saw Glen Velez perform at Philadelphia’s 1987 New Music America Festival, I knew I was seeing and hearing a drummer who made his own beat. Clearly, he inhabited his music and his music inhabited him. No one else sounds quite like him. In those years, Velez was…
Halfway through Black Theatre Troupe’s Waiting to Be Invited, I decided that the three women seated in front of me were more entertaining than the three women emoting up onstage. The actors were giving it their all, but turgid direction and a talky script were doing them in. My trio…
If there’s a heaven, it surely contains a room with David Ira Goldstein’s name on the door. Goldstein has, with Arizona Theatre Company’s new production of H.M.S. Pinafore, resuscitated Gilbert and Sullivan’s most beguiling operetta without deflating its integrity. The director has done away with the stale, mannered nonsense that…
Women from other countries were everywhere in the packed house — women from Congo, Sudan, Chad, Burkina Faso, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq. The circumstances that had brought them to the Valley, and to the audience of Essential Theatre’s Playback Theatre performance last weekend at PlayWright’s Theatre, were not pleasant.They were there…
Some soft, blinking light of common courtesy ordinarily warns people against squabbling on a circus high wire. But this is just practice. And these are the Wallendas — the Flying Wallendas. So, 25 feet up inside the lofty blue peak of the Circus Flora small top, 16-year-old Aurelia Wallenda leans…
A recent decision to stop using mechanized music instead of live musicians in some theater productions has temporarily healed a rift between artists and producers here. Theatre League, a regional troupe that stages its Phoenix shows at the Orpheum, announced last week that it will no longer use “virtual musicians”…
It’s no wonder that actress Cathy Dresbach looked disappointed during her second night curtain call for In Mixed Company’s The Mineola Twins. Although she’d delivered a fine performance in a splendid production, much of Paula Vogel’s knotty dialogue had fallen, that night, on deaf ears. The audience had responded tentatively…
Children of Eden
Late in the 19th century, Marius Petipa choreographed a confectionery story ballet on Tchaikovsky’s music based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale The Nutcracker. Russian choreographer George Balanchine’s version has been enchanting children and adults since 1954. Yet he is one Russian not represented in the Nutcrackers around the Valley this holiday…
Despite the recent collapse of several small theaters, new playhouses are springing up like Christmas tree lots. Would that these companies were offering something other than a handful of interesting performances in shows no discerning playgoer will want to see.Hidden away in a tiny, unmarked storefront, D and D and…
Crumbs From the Table of Joy is far more insightful and entertaining than the archetypal African-American history play. I expected a wistful, nostalgic comedy, but Lynn Nottage’s rarely sentimental story — which Arizona Theatre Company opened at the Herberger last week — is a complex memory play that overcomes its…
It’s 1942, the final year of John Barrymore’s life, and we’ve joined the once-great actor in a tiny playhouse, where he’s come to recapture his former glory. Instead, he delivers a sodden recitation of his days as the clown prince of Broadway’s Royal Family, recalling many of his famous friends…
After kicking off with a cheerily conventional, highly entertaining Barber of Seville, Arizona Opera kicks its season into high gear with a superb, much less conventional staging of Carmen. Maybe because of its lurid tabloid plot, Bizet’s masterpiece, regarded as scandalous when it premièred just months before the composer’s death…
I stopped attending certain of our “little” theaters some years back. After seeing my share of creaky standards wrecked by bad acting and inept direction, I figured I’d done my duty and deserved a reprieve. But Phoenix Theatre has ended my respite with its current production of Arsenic and Old…
Maybe it’s because I’m an atheist. Or perhaps I’m tired of cheap, humorless rehashes of last year’s big moneymaker. Then again, it might have been the dimwitted material and unsubtle setups. Whatever the reason, I loathed nearly every moment of The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged). Chances are,…
The sky to the north flashed with white lightning as I pulled off the 101 onto McDowell and turned into the rutted driveway. It was after 10 on a school night, so parking was easy and the crowd was sparse. The perfect time to check out Arizona’s Original Scream Park.Scaring…
Grace and Glorie
A few years ago, I visited the home of a local museum curator. He took me on a tour of his private collection, a series of dreary sculptures and oversize canvases and a scary assemblage made from old mascara brushes and plastic Dairy Queen spoons that he swore represented the…
