Death and the Maiden turns out to be a lot like a political candidate: lots of promises, and always the hope of answers to it all. But South American playwright Ariel Dorfman sidetracks us with credibility problems–always a bad sign when it comes to politics–and ends up so muddling what…
Death and the Maiden turns out to be a lot like a political candidate: lots of promises, and always the hope of answers to it all. But South American playwright Ariel Dorfman sidetracks us with credibility problems–always a bad sign when it comes to politics–and ends up so muddling what…
According to the Arizona Shakespeare Festival’s production of Romeo and Juliet, Verona was full of crazy people who screamed a lot, mugged outrageously, told jokes and fell on the ground. Of course the title couple lived there as well, and they tried to go about their forbidden love affair, in…
The difficulty in reviewing Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room is knowing how much consideration to give to the playwright’s personal life. The cast of the production at Phoenix Little Theatre wore red ribbons at the curtain call, pointing out to audience members–if they hadn’t already read it in the program–that Marvin’s…
The difficulty in reviewing Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room is knowing how much consideration to give to the playwright’s personal life. The cast of the production at Phoenix Little Theatre wore red ribbons at the curtain call, pointing out to audience members–if they hadn’t already read it in the program–that Marvin’s…
Legend has it that movie mogul Louis B. Mayer once stated: “If you’ve got a message, send a telegram.” With Past History, a new play written by Arizona State University’s Michael Grady and presented at the school’s Galvin Playhouse, Western Union would be snowed under. Past History attempts to draw…
No one served George Bernard Shaw’s satirical purposes better than the religious hypocrite. In The Devil’s Disciple, you can almost hear Shaw smacking his lips in anticipation as he sets forth his plot of the rogue and his pious family. The rogue, of course, ends up with the family fortune,…
Somebody thought it was a good idea for a play. Four guys sit around and say what’s on their minds, sexual betrayal is discovered, somebody ends up getting shot. I don’t know. Maybe there’s an idea in there somewhere. But these are about the most boring four men to be…
:The Seagull, as staged by Arizona Theatre Company, treats Anton Chekhov’s play about love, art and lost youth with the utmost respect. But not with passion, or tenderness, or intelligence, or even the tongue-in-cheek humor that would have breathed some life into the classic. The play doesn’t quite make it…
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf was an exotic sight to Broadway theatregoers of 1976: Onstage were black women speaking and dancing to the words of a contemporary, black, feminist writer, Ntozake Shange, and her black, women characters weren’t matriarchs, whores, domestics, Pinkie in…
Everything that could have gone wrong did. The puppeteer hadn’t shown up. Instead of the five or six friends Lee Breuer was expecting, an audience of 35 adults and children had materialized. He wanted to cancel the performance but was told he couldn’t. So he addressed the audience, warning parents…
When writers write books, they’re published as they’ve written them. Photographers’ photographs are displayed as they’ve printed them. But playwrights and their plays, which require middlemen, are at the mercy of the actors and directors who produce them. The Terry Earp Festival at the 7th Street Theatre complex features five…
In the world of academia, where many things are taken quite seriously, Gus Edwards is like a breath of fresh air. He talks about how as a kid in the Caribbean he was inspired to acting by Sidney Poitier. Was it the chance to… prove that blacks were as capable…
Just when we thought the people at Actors Lab Arizona were going to change their name to the Six Women With Brain Death–or Expiring Minds Want to Know Theatre Company, they closed their long-running revival of their biggest hit ever. But they announced–you guessed it–another revival. This time it’s a…
Lee Breuer is pretty sure that if he gathered together 1,700 press agents, gave them each a copy of his bio and asked them to write an ending to his story, not one of them would place him in a Phoenix suburb, teaching interdisciplinary theatre art on a university campus…
Jaime Ituarte visited New York City for the first time last year. Before he went, his friends gave him the standard tourist warnings about crime. In Ituarte’s case, such advice was even more important because he is legally blind. Still, he says, he could recognize dangerous neighborhoods. “They smelled like…
Its producers describe Psycho Beach Party as “Gidget meets Psycho on the way to Where The Boys Are.” Add elements of The Three Faces of Eve, Marnie, and Mommie Dearest and you will still have only a partial list of the sources tapped by playwright Charles Busch in the creation…
“A musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame? What next? Hello, Dracula!?” Really, it’s only logical–if not inevitable–that after the successes of The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables, someone would try to put a third French novel to work as a musical play. Also, since all three…
Meatloaf rolled his wheelchair to the very edge of the stage. “We’ve got to get out of this trap before this decadence saps our wills!” he moaned. Astonished, I watched in helpless silence as the beefy singer stopped just short of plunging over the multicolored footlights and into my lap…
“One stray grain of rice on that slick stage floor, and bang!–you’re on your ass,” frets Bruce Miles. The producer of the Mill Avenue Theatre’s impending live rendition of The Rocky Horror Show, speaking during a recent photo session, confesses he doesn’t know what to expect of the audience when…
If you knew Tom Oldendick of Phoenix Little Theatre–a flamboyant type who performs a story rather than tells it–you’d be laughing so hard you’d forget for a moment that the three-act comedy he’s replaying almost cost you, the Phoenix taxpayer, a cool half million. He doesn’t spring his story as…
“TED BUNDY’S CORPSE! EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS INSIDE!” screeched an actual headline from the cover of a recent supermarket scandal rag, trumpeting “the pictures every American wants to see” of that executed serial killer. Even in death, the strangely charismatic Bundy–who’d been portrayed in a TV movie by heartthrob Mark Harmon–remained a…
