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Update: Hamilton Returning to ASU Gammage for 2020-2021; 2019-2020 Lineup Set

By Stuart Warner
Mar 12, 2019

Another season of Broadway crowd-pleasers.
Arizona Opera Promises Bold, But Arizona Lady Is a Bore

By Lynn Trimble
Oct 19, 2015

As Arizona Opera opened its three-day Phoenix run for an operetta titled Arizona Lady at Symphony Hall on Friday night, the audience was clearly excited by the prospect of hearing a story set in the Southwest. Simply the sight of the set, complete with cactus and a distant mesa, was enough to...
Arizona Opera and Poet Laureate Alberto Rios Collaborate on Arizona Lady

By Lynn Trimble
Oct 15, 2015

Arizona Opera's falls season opens with a collaboration that sets a high bar. Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Ríos recently collaborated with Arizona Opera for its production of Arizona Lady, an operetta set in Tucson in 1925. Think gold rush, rodeos, and horse thieves. It’s opera on the lighter side, with plenty...
The Finer Points of The Taste Test Get Lost in Black Theatre Troupe's Production

By Robrt L. Pela
Oct 14, 2015

Frank Higgins' The Taste Test is a smartly written, talky play about power struggle and betrayal. Its snappy dialogue and brittle undertones require a strong cast and tight direction to sell finer points and to keep the story moving. Unfortunately, the Black Theatre Troupe production does not offer these amenities...
Orange Theatre's Blood Wedding Gallops Through Completed Version at ASU Tempe's Lyceum

By Julie Peterson
Jul 26, 2014

The setup: Orange Theatre's industrially flavored, iconoclastic mounting of Lorca's Blood Wedding is similar in many ways to the roughly two-thirds complete work-in-progress version we got to see last winter. The company develops a play in several periods spanning about a year, and viewing multiple iterations reveals some of the...
Downtown Phoenix's Space 55 Presents a Different 7 Minutes in Heaven Each Saturday in June

By Julie Peterson
Jun 20, 2014

The setup: Space 55's Late Night Series is a thing we've visited and written about before. It's alternative performance for (eventually) every taste, something we both enjoy and pine for more of. This month, Saturday nights at 9 p.m. bring us 7 Minutes in Heaven, a thing that link kind...
The Full Monty from Mesa Encore Drops More Than Trou

By Julie Peterson
Jun 12, 2014

The setup: There really isn't anything wrong with the lemons God gave you, even before you pluckily make lemonade from them. But in 1997, when director Peter Cattaneo showed us the work of screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) in The...
Young Frankenstein Is Proportionally Large at Peoria's Arizona Broadway Theatre

By Julie Peterson
May 30, 2014

The setup: You may remember a massive hit musical, The Producers, that was based on a Mel Brooks film that, by the time this century turned, not really all that many people remembered. You might not realize that Brooks wrote all the songs for that show, not just "Springtime for...
Bitch of the Baskervilles at Downtown Phoenix's Trunk Space This Weekend Only

By Julie Peterson
May 24, 2014

The setup: Let's set you up, first. You obviously need something to do with yourself this long weekend, based on last night's two-hour-plus karaoke rotations, and now that the chick who sang "Don't Stop Believing" has doubtless been murdered, you can get some investigative tips from Holmes and Watson at...
Avenue Q: We Can Tell You How to Get to It (Go to Phoenix Theatre)

By Julie Peterson
May 22, 2014

The setup: Avenue Q, a sort of adults-only musical parody of Sesame Street that exists and functions, nevertheless, completely independently of the kids' show, opened in 2003 and won a cluster of Tonys. One would think its songs and subject matter, apparently quite topical at the time, would feel dated...
Space 55's New Short Plays Heyre Be Dragons . . . In My Mind, Plus Late-Night Serial Captain Jack's Space Attack

By Julie Peterson
May 9, 2014

The setup: One of the myriad ways Space 55 Ensemble enriches our community is by developing, training, and showcasing new writers, whether they're creating solo performance pieces or plays with several characters, a plot, the whole nine yards. Space 55's current mainstage show, Heyre Be Dragons . . . In...
Actors Theatre's Good People Captivates Downtown Phoenix Audiences

By Julie Peterson
May 2, 2014

The setup: In playwright David Lindsay-Abaire's (Rabbit Hole, A Devil Inside, Fuddy Meers, Wonder of the World) most recent local première, Good People, South Boston single mom Margie (Katie McFadzen) has, in the latest in a string of bad breaks, lost her crappy job as a dollar-store cashier. The radiant...
Musical The Secret Garden Delves Into the Human Psyche at Peoria's Arizona Broadway Theatre

By Julie Peterson
Apr 30, 2014

The setup: Late Victorian children's novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden is the typical story of a couple of more or less orphaned kids pluckily figuring out how to thrive and then transform the useless adults who were supposed to be responsible for them. One of Burnett's later works,...
ASU Tempe's Binary Theatre Looks for Answers with Earthlings, Tonight Through Sunday

By Julie Peterson
Apr 25, 2014

The setup: So Binary Theatre Company is the name of the current incarnation of the student-run live theater production organization (they're not a gang; they're a club) under the auspices of Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts' School of Film, Dance, and Theatre. That is one...
Dames at Sea (Okay, Across from the Water Tower) at Gilbert's Hale Centre Theatre Will Shuffle Its Way Into Your Heart

By Julie Peterson
Apr 18, 2014

The setup: Before sometime in the 1940s, American musical theater consisted of just a buttload of singing and dancing, reasons to look at women's exposed legs, and no particular attempt at character or storytelling. During the Great Depression, movies were an affordable, diverting novelty, and the more implausibly cheerful and...
Scottsdale's Theatre Artists Studio Revives And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little

By Julie Peterson
Apr 17, 2014

The setup: Many of the best off-Broadway theaters are clubs of a kind: like-minded artists who've come together to form a company that produces the kind of work they value, to joyfully challenge their skills, to share the results with audiences in a meaningful way. If you've spent years doing...
Around the World in 80 Days in Downtown Phoenix in a Couple of Hours, from Arizona Theatre Company

By Julie Peterson
Apr 10, 2014

The setup: If you're fans of some of the Valley's best theater artists, it's both delightful and reassuring when they get particularly good jobs like a gig with Arizona Theatre Company, which is a nice bump in pay, visibility, and production values. Around the World in 80 Days is our...
Don't Dress for Dinner Is a Farce to Be Reckoned with at Desert Foothills Theater

By Julie Peterson
Apr 4, 2014

The setup: Madcap, whirlwind, and sexy, the farce is the perfect form of theater to revive the pants off of during recovery from an economic recession. As I recall, if you do it right, an illicit relationship can be one of the most affordable diversions ("We can't go out; people...
New Musical National Pastime at Peoria's Theater Works: Hit, Run, and Score Mean Different Things Onstage

By Julie Peterson
Mar 28, 2014

The setup: Three American cities have hosted "tryout" productions this season of National Pastime, a new musical with an interesting little history and a super-adorable, relatively plausible premise. Its creators continue to project optimism about its suitability for Broadway, or at least they did before it opened at Theater Works...
The Sickie Bunch from The [SIC] [sic] [?] Sense: Perfectly Repulsive

By Julie Peterson
Mar 21, 2014

The setup: For The [SIC] Sense's third show in its new home in the Basement Theatre at Phoenix Center for the Arts, the sketch comedy troupe takes a break from transitioning new cast members in and welcomes back Kristie Cowles, a one-woman ninja patrol of comic anarchy. About half of...