I honestly can’t decide whether Ballet Arizona’s annual homage to legendary choreographer George Balanchine is best suited to ballet experts or complete novices. Saturday night’s performance of All Balanchine at Symphony Hall had something for everyone, with three ballets that truly showcased three distinct types of choreography from Balanchine’s hundreds…
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…
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,…
It’s a rainy day in New York as Mike Birbiglia reflects on comedy. Since beginning a career in stand-up in his early 20s, the Boston-bred comedian certainly has come a long way, both professionally and personally. Between starting out as a pizza-bingeing, commitment-fearing night owl with undiagnosed REM disorder to…
South Park fans and musical enthusiasts, rejoice. Mormons, maybe not so much. The Broadway production of The Book of Mormon, which has won nine Tony Awards including Best Musical, has announced it’s taking its national tour to Tempe for ASU Gammage’s 2015-16 season. Exact dates have not been announced…
It’s no surprise that comedian Moshe Kasher has a unique perspective on life that shines through in both his stand-up and written word. Before graduating high school, he was a sign language interpreter, drug addict, Hasidic Jew, and avid gangster rap fan. Both of his parents were deaf and he…
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…
Some people might argue that it’s too early to start making New Year’s Eve plans. We’ll just assume those people haven’t heard the news about Brian Regan. The renowned comedian is kicking off the second leg of his 2014 North American tour with stops in 48 cities, including Phoenix on…
There is no critiquing a play like The Pornozombies, now onstage at Nearly Naked Theatre. The Pornozombies is intentionally bad theater, a two-act so deliberately self-conscious that it never appears to be sending up either pornography or cheesy zombie movies. Plays like this offer a couple of hours of harmless…
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…
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…
The last true carryovers from the counterculture will bring their time-tested comedy and musical routine to Wild Horse Pass Hotel & Casino on Saturday, April 12. Cheech & Chong are as entertaining and relevant as ever — even though the taboo nature of marijuana has significantly dissipated. Fans can expect…
The classical music ensemble Arizona Pro Arte (APA) is finishing up its 2013-14 season with a bang. APA will debut two new pieces of music, which will be accompanied by the new Arizona Pro Arte Dance Ensemble, in Apotheosis of the Dance on Thursday, April 10, at Tempe Center for…
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…
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…
The curtains open tonight for the Dance Graduate Choreographic Presentations, a series of performances by groups of graduate dancers from ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. The performances showcase everything from modern dance and pointe to a little dance theater, and, based on what we saw during a…
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…
Mesa Encore Theatre announced last week that it will receive the 2014 Twink Lynch Organizational Achievement Award from the American Association of Community Theatre on Saturday, June 21, during AACTWorldFest in Venice, Florida. This is a pretty big deal. Though only a few Valley theaters are members of AACT, the…
Amy Schumer is taking her Backdoor Tour to Celebrity Theatre tomorrow night. And if you haven’t already shelled out $38.50 for the 8 p.m. show, you might want to get on that. The unfiltered, unapologetic comedienne of all things sexual and unspoken has quickly become one of the most talked…
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…
When we heard that Performance in the Borderlands was teaming up with ASU Deer Valley Rock Art Center once again, with the added collaboration of ASU’s Gammage’s BEYOND series, we knew there was cause for celebration. In an event scheduled for the end of this month, Japanese performance artists Eiko…
After what seemed like a very long time, Phoenix Theatre’s production of Pippin stopped shrieking and wiggling its collective hips, and shuddered to a close. Meanwhile, we — an audience made up mostly of “people of a certain age” — endured a lifeless rip-off of Cirque du Soleil staged by…
