The sensational story of Medea has fascinated audiences throughout time. Corneille wrote a version in 1635, and Cherubini turned it into an opera in 1797. Broadway has produced this play more often (and more successfully) than any other classic. Dame Judith Anderson won a Tony Award as Best Actress in…
In 1977, a very lean year for drama, The Shadow Box won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, but lost the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award to David Mamet’s American Buffalo. “Disease plays” were fashionable then, but about this one, critics were divided. The more intellectual of them…
The best play of 1966 has arrived in Phoenix, and even 29 years later, it is still the most outrageous comedy of the season. It’s also one of the funniest. The play is Joe Orton’s Loot, in a production by Tres Repertory Theatre in Park Central Mall. Now half-deserted, this…
If Forrest Gump’s mother was right (“Life is like a box of . . .”), then Arizona Comedy Theatre Company’s Coming Attractions is like a Whitman’s Sampler with all the tops pushed in so we know what we’re going to get. Four dedicated performers have put themselves on display with…
Liam Neeson is a fine big slab of testosterone, a competent actor and a reasonably likable screen presence. He’s not, however, a movie star. He may be paid like a movie star, he may be given starring roles, but the excitement, the sense of intimacy that a true movie star…
Unfairly, the word “amateur” is usually a pejorative term. The literal definition is “one who practices any art, study or sport for pleasure and not for money.” Unfortunately, “amateur” also can imply a lack of skill or finish, and such is the case with Theater Works’ current production of John…
Marlon Brando’s star turn in 1990’s The Freshman was possibly the greatest piece of self-parody in the history of film acting. Sending up his Godfather persona, the actor transcended it–he gave soul, warmth, humor and true innocence to the bleak old don, and the performance had both vitality and a…
Style matches content in Exotica. The film is set in a strip club, and writer-director Atom Egoyan, a Canadian of Armenian descent, doles out his story as slowly and strategically as a stripper doles out skin. Sadly, having slipped your six bucks under Exotica’s garter belt, you may find it…
If it were possible to run Four Weddings and a Funeral, Strictly Ballroom and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert through a blender together, the result would look a lot like the new Australian film Muriel’s Wedding. From the first, there are two weddings and one funeral; from…
During the mid-’80s, I heard director Richard Donner interviewed on television. He was plugging his film Lethal Weapon and noting, with a touch of Reagan-era pride, that on this project, he had gone back to the old, discreet conventions of action movies and TV, where the actor who was shot…
Cynics beware! Phoenix Theatre has booked a show as irrepressible as an untrained puppy. And like a puppy, this entertainment promises to knock you over and bathe your face with wet kisses, these of homespun wisdom. It will make you giggle with delight if you can withstand the Hallmark-greeting-card pretensions…
In 1981, I attended the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where a new writer made a stunning debut with a series of monologues grouped together under the title Talking With. The festival was abuzz. Who was this mysterious writer whom no one had…
Despite insistence from some commentators that it was worthy of an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Hoop Dreams failed even to cinch a nod in the Best Documentary category. Veteran Oscar buffs won’t be too surprised at this. Again and again, those rare documentaries that demonstrate anything resembling wide popular…
Set in 1979, Strawberry and Chocolate is a small, idyllic comedy about the political re-education of a young, conservative, staunchly Communist student by a gay, liberal, intellectual artist. It would seem an unlikely film to come out of Cuba, yet it’s that country’s entry for the foreign-language Oscar this year…
I was in my early 20s when Billie Holiday became my personal idol. Her heartfelt phrasing of the simplistic truths of Tin Pan Alley captured the ache, the wonder, the joy of my young soul as no one else could. She had died three years before I ever thrilled to…
The considerable charm of the new historical epic Queen Margot is that, when all is said and done, it’s really about how a nice, sexy, slightly wild Catholic girl manages to break free of her dysfunctional family. The historical Margot of the title was a political bargaining chip in 16th-century…
Brian Friel writes buckets of language that we are invited to smear over our faces as we greedily savor the taste of words, like blueberries plucked from the bush of memory. If this is an obscure image, you will appreciate it more after seeing Dancing at Lughnasa, presented at Herberger…
Most political thrillers, even the well-made and exciting ones, are cop-outs in the end. Of dozens of titles one could name, from The Manchurian Candidate to The China Syndrome to Capricorn One to The Pelican Brief to Clear and Present Danger, all, good and bad, start by dramatizing some valid…
Some theatre historians have attributed the decline of theatre to the diminishing stature of the dramatic hero. Greek tragedies centered on kings and gods, Shakespeare’s plays on dukes and princes. By the time O’Neill wrote about actors, poets and prostitutes, Miller about salesmen and movie stars, Williams about football heroes,…
Grand Canyon University’s production of Georg Kaiser’s 1918 play Gas I has scored a bull’s eye on a virtual blind spot in my experience. Never having seen productions of Capek’s R.U.R., Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, or any of the 73 plays Kaiser apparently wrote in addition to Gas I, my…
Samuel Beckett was arguably the most important writer for the theatre of our century. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, Beckett wrote three masterpieces for the stage: Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1960). Many people would add Happy Days (1961) to this…
What’s an O.J. junkie to do? That rascally Judge Ito recessed the Simpson trial for four days, and it looked like a long weekend, indeed, until I found myself at Phoenix Theatre’s immensely satisfying production of To Kill a Mockingbird. There is something inherently dramatic about trials: two sides in…
