A Midsummer Night’s Dream is arguably Shakespeare’s most exquisitely wrought piece of dramatic construction. Three tales intermingle to weave a magical web of three comic styles. Sophisticated romantic comedy featuring witty ripostes is the manner of the court creatures, ruled by Theseus and his new bride, Hippolyta. The rude mechanicals,…
The Immortals can rest easy. Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Sir Henry Irving, the divine Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore, Sir John Gielgud, Lord Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Sir Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Nicol Williamson, Jonathan Pryce, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mel Gibson, Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes and, now, even…
A friend of mine once made the mistake of performing a scene from a Neil Simon play in an acting class. “Stop!” the teacher cried, clutching his head. His objection was not to the acting (although hindsight says it was probably bad). Rather, the teacher complained, Simon’s plays lacked character…
Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre is an alternative theatre that features experimental work. Experimental work implies that the outcome of the procedure is unknown. Any true experiment poses the possibility of failure. It is therefore no crime that Planet Earth’s current offering, Liberating Mama, is a disaster. Laraine Herring has written…
It seemed absurd a few months ago to read the obituaries of Eugene Ionesco. Hadn’t he been dead for years? Was this a variation on the old joke about Franco? Overshadowed by the genius of Samuel Beckett, Ionesco’s plays have seemed like literary footnotes from the past, ranking with those…
Since I played Scrooge in the eighth grade, I have avoided all Christmas plays as a matter of principle. But this year, as a result of my new obligations, I was forced to spend a week surveying the local offerings of the holiday season. I have seen Mesa Community College’s…
“There is so much bad in the best of us, and so much good in the worst, that it doesn’t seem right to criticize.” Thornton Wilder thus quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his one-act play Pullman Car Hiawatha, the most substantial in an evening of three short works collectively titled…
“Family values” have been ballyhooed by politicians so mindlessly that it may come as a shock to take a good, hard look at a nuclear family from the Dark Ages. Phoenix Theatre affords us this chance with its production of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter. The play deals with…
Let’s think back to the summer of 1986, when it was only 20 years ago to the day that the Monkees first said, “Hey, hey!” Concertgoers at the Jones Beach Theater in New York were doing their customary hanging out in the parking lot before the show. But this was…
The theatre as an art form seems to be receding from relevance to our lives. With the exception of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America, plays about contemporary problems have yielded to film as the art form of preference in our contemporary culture. But theatre in America, which has been…
Presumed by many to be Shakespeare’s first play, The Comedy of Errors is a terrible comedy. Based on an ancient Roman farce written by Plautus 1,800 years or so before Shakespeare, the plot is so mechanical and the exposition so cumbersome, it is amazing a writer of any skill would…
An injudicious case of grand larceny is taking place at Dial Corporate Center’s Playhouse on the Park in downtown Phoenix. It might be termed “Crimes of the Art.” The occasion is Phoenix Theatre’s production of Beth Henley’s 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Crimes of the Heart, and it blatantly steals from…
Stacking the Decadent The Academy Award-winning movie Cabaret is available at your local video store (even supermarket), with career-defining performances by Joel Grey, Liza Minnelli and Michael York. So why not snuggle up with some microwave popcorn and give it a replay? Why would you want to drive all the…
If overheated histrionics is your bag, Dingo Troupe’s production of A Prayer for My Daughter delivers a fix to satisfy the most insatiable melodrama junkie. The first play by Thomas Babe, a protege of the late Public Theater impresario Joseph Papp, this potboiler premiered in the mid-Seventies, so it is…
Mutilated human corpses pile up in Port-au-Prince, severed body parts strew the roads of Rwanda, blood flows in Bosnia to cleanse Yugoslavia of ethnic impurity. Even on the eve of an invasion, ruthless dictators cling to power in the name of the people, ignoring the will of the electorate. And…
The Phantom of the Opera is not just a musical. It is an industry. Written by the richest man in the theatre, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and produced by the second-richest man in the theatre, Cameron Mackintosh, Phantom has been marketed to Phoenix as the biggest thing ever to hit the…
In the preface to a collection of his plays, author Christopher Durang fondly recalls the famous I Love Lucy episode in which Little Ricky is born. This show prompted Durang to pattern his first play, written in the second grade, after the story. Since this work isn’t publicly available, it’s…
A play about Antarctica seems like a good antidote for the summer heat in Phoenix. But Terra Nova, the story of the 1911 race for the South Pole, trades one hell for another. Playwright Ted Tally uses the death of one of Britain’s most cherished heroes, the explorer Robert Falcon…
After seeing the latest version of Forbidden Broadway, I left Herberger Theater Center depressed. My reaction was like the one I had when a shock jock started telling jokes about the homeless. His routine was clever, all right, but wasn’t the subject too sad to be funny? Forbidden Broadway 1994,…
In Lips Together, Teeth Apart, Terrence McNally’s 1991 play staged by Arizona Theatre Company, we’re treated to the spectacle of a weekend with two upscale couples at an expensive Fire Island beach house sipping their bloody marys out on the deck while hating themselves and each other. This is not…
Some musicals beg you to like them. They brandish their sincerity as a weapon–you’re hit over the head, grabbed by the throat and throttled. If you try to resist, well, you’re the kind of dour-hearted drudge who ought to stick to Eugene O’Neill revivals. But even those who have really…
Everyone in the audience was laughing like crazy. I saw a man on the aisle wipe away tears. The laughter was the from-the-gut kind, and it was for a song called “A Secretary Is Not a Toy.” I laughed as hard as anybody, because the experience had the same effect…
