You should know that the pleated, bejeweled part of Paisley Yankolovich’s costume in this photo is a vibrant, mother-of-the-groom royal blue. The rest of his clothing is black. This combo, in the manner of Proust’s madeleines, will recall the ubiquitous leggings, baggy sweaters, and big hair of 1985 for anyone…
Oakland, California’s AlulA Ensemble proves with their PHX:fringe show, Tight Assets, that you can be kind of up your own ass about your art and still make things that people want to see. For all the crunchy, first-world-problems tweeness of their vision statement and CVs, they’re a solid, hard-working, entertaining…
PHX:fringe update: Phoenix’s own Space 55 production of Night of the Chicken 2: The Rise of Aunt Lulu was added to the Fringe schedule. It’s a live-radio-broadcast-style show by local playwright Carrie Behrens that’s suitable for the whole family. The final performance is tomorrow, Saturday, March 10, at 8:30 p.m…
BlackPoet Ventures is a Valley institution. They present fascinating, quality performance work that frequently mixes the disciplines of poetry, drama, dance, and music to impart a rounded image of African-American culture and its role models. BPV’s Cool Like That: A Tribute to Miles Davis is a painstakingly researched, lovingly presented…
Theatre in My Basement’s PHX:fringe show might not be the same show I saw Sunday, March 4. Or it might be the same. That’s because, according to the company, whether they present Twitch or Eclypse [sic] or Kassandra depends on “the whims of the audience and the performers.” Now, the…
Actors Alchemy is a group of Valley performers who allegedly get together every week and work on their craft. This is a good thing. Plenty of acting teachers charge money, and some of them deserve to, but you can accomplish a lot in a cooperative with your peers, too, while…
Phoenix Center for the Arts is right in the middle of building an elevator. It isn’t finished yet, though, so please keep in mind that unless you can get up stairs somehow, you won’t be able to attend any PHX:fringe performances that are scheduled in PCA’s studio, which is on…
Update: The PHX:fringe performance of The Soul Justice Project’s The Other Side of History, scheduled for Thursday, March 8, has been cancelled. Having PHX:fringe begin on First Friday had its pros and cons, from what I could see. There were, as usual, a shit-ton of people running around, but they…
There’s no particular reason that Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone has to be colorful, silly, upbeat, or life-affirming. Actors Theatre’s Matthew Wiener could have directed it as a relatively serious play with a few very funny lines. It starts like this: Gordon, a self-centered man in a very questionable…
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is an interesting, sometimes moving, sometimes funny play, well-staged by Stray Cat Theatre, and you can sit and enjoy it with or without believing in God (or, apparently, in Judas Iscariot, which is a separate thing, according to an acquaintance who remarked to me…
We’re getting all jiggly with excitement for the unknown quantities that are the performances of PHX:fringe. Since sharing this preview, we’ve made plans to see and review a whole bunch of shows. And because we can’t be everywhere at once, we’re stopping by again to share what else we bet…
Before you hit the dance floor, you might want to take a few pointers from the pros. And this weekend, members of Scorpius Dance Theatre are dishing out some serious moves. On Saturday, March 3, the local contemporary dance company is hosting Dance Marathon 3, a day-long series of classes open…
One of the cool things about Teatro Bravo! is that you can’t predict what kind of Latino theater they’re going to give you. It might be a socially conscious tale of contemporary people, with echoes of older myths; it might be a biography of a public figure, bringing light to…
Don’t worry — the characters in The Unexpected Man are still both relatable and ridiculous. The two people are still trapped together for a finite period by social convention, driven like pack mules by their pride and insecurity. But it’s just enough gentler, warmer, less pessimistic than playwright Yasmina Reza’s…
Desert Stages Theatre artistic director Terry Helland clearly is mad. Onto the tiny black box stage of his Actor’s Café, he continues to wedge dark, offbeat plays that no doubt strike terror in the hearts of the mainstream theatergoers who turn up in droves for the more bland fare on…
No one gets stoned to death, and you only have to pay if you win — doesn’t get much better than that. Tickets for the Broadway tour of Wicked, which started its current Tempe run on Wednesday, are scarce and/or spendy. To make your last-minute, fingers-crossed bottom-feeding more potentially productive,…
Yikes. It’s always a risk to set yourself up in your production’s title or tagline, such as the one in the headline above, for ASU Tempe’s centennial show Untold Stories/Unsung Heroes — another trap that suggests the snarky “There’s a reason these were untold before now.” But I winced even…
It’s just polished and adorable silliness from beginning to end. That’s most of what there is to say about the Tony-winning lunacy of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, in a fine production transplanted from Minnesota’s Guthrie Theater by Arizona Theatre Company. Director Joel Sass has the four performers (one of…
History is written by the winners, they say. Memoir is even more selective, having generally been preserved by people who are not just literate, but literate in a language the victors understand (which weeds out quite a few), and often by those who think interesting things have happened to them…
For 11 days in March, we’ll get to revel in off-the-beaten-path (ideally) performances — 23 different ones, in 88 time slots at five locations — in the fifth annual Phoenix Fringe Festival. Local alt-Christian glam-rock-opera dude Paisley Yankolovich is back on the schedule (we missed him last year!), and some new…
Have you ever been in so far above your depth that you could barely function? Of course you have; and those are great learning experiences, but you still pity the other people who had to watch. It’s no fun to tell you that’s what it appears to be like to…
Some dudes are more than eager to fork over $24.95 a month to see local porn starlets Priya Rai and Taryn Thomas either on DVD or via the Internet. Valley party promoter Chuck Huus, however, is hoping they’ll be eager to spend that same amount for the opportunity to meet…
