David Vining is many things: theater director, dialect coach, university professor. In Stray Cat Theater’s new production of Blackbird, Vining reminds us that he’s also a fine actor. His rather estimable job in this one-act, written by David Harrower and directed by Stray Cat founder Ron May, is to create…
One of my favorite “little musicals” ever, ever, ever is Oil City Symphony. I could eat eggplant Parmigiana and watch that show for five, six days in a row and not need another diversion. You don’t see Oil City produced a lot these days, maybe partly because the four original cast members all…
No one really doubts that professional entertainers are as maddeningly human as the rest of us. Nevertheless, the nostalgic farces of contemporary playwright Ken Ludwig mine comic gold from pondering that mystery. Typically, two groups of characters bump both literally and figuratively into each other: talented, worn-out, disillusioned “stars” and…
If, as the saying goes, no news is good news, then this year’s theater season is nothing but good news. Great news, in fact, for those of us who don’t like our plays and musicals to do much of anything new or different. Magnificent news for anyone worried that local…
The theater season has officially begun in our little cultural sweatbox, and that means more of the musicals have live orchestras again. This is great news, and it makes Theater Works’ current production of Camelot just that much less dreary. The score has great, popular, memorable songs that audience members…
The funniest thing I saw the other night at Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre wasn’t up on stage, but rather in the men’s room. As I stood in the lavatory stall, relinquishing the two gin-and-tonics that had made getting through another cheeseball musical slightly less painful, I noticed a butter knife…
It’s been 25 years this summer since Denver talk-radio host Alan Berg was murdered in his own driveway by one of his white-supremacist anti-fans. Eric Bogosian’s 1987 play Talk Radio, partly based on Berg’s career, just opened at Chyro Arts Venue, serving an unsettling blend of nostalgia, activism, and respectable…
Oh, my. 1960 (and what passed for groundbreaking then) was a very long time ago, wasn’t it? The longest-running musical ever in the whole world, The Fantasticks, manages to make that very clear while still demonstrating what made it so popular. (Some of that success has got to be mere…
I’m not a big Rent fan. I know: It’s a musical theater milestone; it single-handedly revived the sung-through musical; its monster success here and abroad introduced a whole new generation to musical theater. It won the Pulitzer Prize, four Tony awards, and a half-dozen Drama Desk Awards. Blah blah blah…
I like music. I like theater. I’ve found that I even like musical theater at least some of the time. But the “revue” genre of theater is a kind of torture, as far as I’m concerned. I’d love to spend an evening listening to an excellent vocalist working through just…
First, a quick happy note: Childsplay has received donations of vehicle repair, maintenance, and a promotional color van wrap from Purcell Tire, FastSigns, and the reality show NASCAR Angels. This fabulous collection of valuable services will greatly benefit the award-winning professional children’s theater (which tours like a mofo so that…
Even if the largely teenage cast of bare: A Musical hadn’t succeeded in really selling this rather stunning story of naughty Catholic school kids, it would have appeared that they had. That’s because the audience for Aperio Productions’ loud, rowdy show screamed with joy after every number, as if they…
So much bouncing. So much squealing. I love to watch young audiences. They’re better than the show — but that’s true even when the show is really good, like the productions of Great Arizona Puppets. And everybody quiets down and sits still when the lights change and Tinker Bell opens…
Man, if I had to choose between: a. making a living in the arts by presenting plotless musical revues and exploitive, offensive, witless bedroom farces andb. not making a living in the arts at all, I’d probably sit up a lot with insomnia. To be fair, audiences who love this stuff skeeve me out way…
Terry Helland, director of Desert Stages Theatre’s Jekyll and Hyde, took the stage just before curtain. “This show is the most difficult I’ve ever worked on,” he announced cheerfully. “But I think I got a handle on it.” That didn’t seem likely, somehow. Directors typically produce crap and think it’s…
I get it when theaters want to make sure we know that something like Rent or Les Mis has been cleaned up and squooshed down for young performers and young audiences, but I don’t think anyone had to stick the word “KIDS” on the title of a stage musical based…
You are seated, for the sixth consecutive year, in an imaginary auditorium, where the sound of rustling programs and impatiently shuffling feet suggest that the doling out of the Robbie Awards is about to commence. A hush falls over the pretend crowd, made up entirely of people who sell insurance…
Martha J. Clarke and the costume shop of Arizona Broadway Theatre have done it again. From the cowboy-print pajamas on little brother Randolph to the huge, crinolined confections on the wives and mothers, ABT’s Bye Bye Birdie is a vinyl overnight bag crammed with the ginchiest Barbie and Ken outfits…
You may not realize it, but we have a Hale Centre Theatre in the Valley because a nice young couple, Ruth and Nathan Hale, moved from Salt Lake City to the L.A. area in 1943 and discovered they could get more acting work if they opened their own theater. The…
Stephen Sondheim is not America’s most hummable, road-trip-sing-alongy composer (unless you run with a really esoteric crowd). He’s known for polyphony, occasional purposeful dissonance, and using meter and rhythm to reinforce subject matter and plot developments — sometimes even writing songs that sound like a pointillist painting (Sunday in the…
Broadway Palm Dinner Theater’s production of High School Musical was nice enough. My impression of the show was certainly helped by the fact that I, unlike most people my age, don’t have kids between the ages of four months and 14 years, so I’m not sick to death of “Get’cha Head…
For every person who claims that Tempe’s Gammage Auditorium is a marvel of acoustic excellence, you can probably find one who’s been subjected to plays that sound like talking mud. Apparently, it has to do with where you’re sitting and what kind of performance it is — whether it’s instrumental…
