A House with No Walls is neither an enlightening history lesson nor a compelling entertainment. Thomas Gibbons’ play tells us nothing we didn’t already know about America’s unfortunate history of slavery, and its iTheatre Collaborative production, which commenced last weekend, provides little more than a handful of interesting performances. Flashbacks…
Say it out loud, hookers: “Dixie Longate.” Mmmm, they sure do. Photo by Bradford Rogne. Hey, it’s another one-person off-Broadway touring show that features a lot of audience interaction. This trend is probably a good thing, with all these big expensive new Valley venues to fill up with stuff. So the late Spalding…
Eduardo Montalvo, David Tinsley, and Jade Johnson in Revenge of a King. Photo by Laura Durant. Messing with Shakespeare can be a very good thing. It introduces audiences to a variety of genres and styles of theater that they might have overlooked or avoided in the past. The cross-pollination runs…
Before his death last month, Dale Wasserman was among a handful of Americans to whom the title “Broadway legend” applied — although it seems likely that the famous (and famously grumpy) playwright would have disdained that title. Yet it was true. Wasserman wrote more than a dozen plays and musicals,…
Matt DeAngelis, Kyle Harris (front), Lauren Lebowitz, and the company, in Hair. Photos © Tim Fuller. Arizona Theatre Company has announced an additional week of performances for their current production of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, and that’s good news for Valley audiences, because this show is bumpin’. When you…
Oy, the schmaltz: Jake Ehrenreich embraces his heritage in A Jew Grows in Brooklyn. Photo by Carol Rosegg. Full disclosure, and probably the weirdest one Curtains will ever have to make: In the middle of this (mostly) one-man show, during which: a. Creator-performer Jake Ehrenreich shows slides of, among other things, his…
As usual, I saw a hell of a lot of plays this past year. But I suspect 2008 is the year I’ll remember not so much for what took place on stage (although it’s hard to forget a production as flawless as Childsplay’s A Tale of Two Cities, or one…
It’s okay, ladies, it’s almost over: Jenny Mulcahy and Rebecca Ruegg are featured in Blithe Spirit. Photo by Heather Butcher. I can’t say exactly why, in the 13+ years they’ve been around, I’d never been to a show at Scottsdale Desert Stages until the other day. But enough about me. Desert Stages…
We laughed, we cried, we fashion policed: Edward Prostak (Scrooge) and David Errigo Jr. (Christmas Past). Photo by Scott Samplin © 2008 I’ve brushed off my black trousers and Ugly Christmas Sweater one last time to review a production at a Broadway-style dinner theater (yes, that’s an oxymoron): the…
About three minutes into Stray Cat Theatre’s newest production, I found myself thinking: This can’t be really happening. When you go to see it — and you must, if you do nothing else this holiday season, go see this astonishing stage production — you will almost certainly experience the same…
Damon Dering (standing, center) plays Irish O’Flanagan in Times Square Angel in its Arizona premiere, presented by Nearly Naked Theatre. Photo by Nancy Lynn Miller. This week, Curtains flees gratefully back into the arms of the counterculture, but not far enough to avoid seeing another Christmas show. Charles Busch’s campy melodramedy…
Kelly Leeth and Fred Bornhoeft are adorable in Miracle on 34th Street. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and he was heard mildly cursing into his body mic during a quick backstage costume change last Saturday night in Peoria. But he shouldn’t feel bad. Seriously, actor Fred Bornhoeft…
Theater director Damon Dering has wanted to produce David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly for nearly two decades. He first fell in love with the play “sometime before 1991,” he tells us in his director’s notes for the production that his company, Nearly Naked Theatre, has recently unveiled. Dering has, he…
By Julie Peterson Mary Riley and Richard Baird in The Winter’s Tale. Photo by Laura Durant, graphic enhancements by Southwest Shakespeare Co. Watching a play by William Shakespeare can be like watching a biopic (or, for that matter, like trying to get on an O.J. Simpson jury) — you already know what…
By Julie Peterson Let’s lay some cards on the table, here: I’m not crazy about traditional, mid-century, Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-style musical theater. I’m also not crazy about more recent spectaculars like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s. It’s not that I think less of those genres; it’s just that musical theater has so many challenging…
The Lady with All the Answers is an agreeably entertaining character study in search of a story. Its direction by Samantha K. Wyer is faultless; its set, where we are left to visit Eppie Lederer (best known to you and me as the late, syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers), is…
In the whiny author’s notes printed in the program for Richard Dresser’s A View of the Harbor, the playwright carps about how hard it is to write plays. Because this commentary is punctuated with several sour jabs at theater critics, I was hoping I’d like his new play more than…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio appears in Anna Deavere Smith’s new play, but don’t ask her to tell you how he comes off. “He’s in there, that’s all I’m saying,” Smith says firmly. “You’ll just have to come to the production to see how he shows up.” Local theatergoers will be among…
Like most real-life marriages, Theater Artists Studio’s Marriage Play is lopsided. The company’s production of Edward Albee’s comic drama is expertly directed by Kathleen Butler, a chum and frequent collaborator of Albee’s who originated the female role in this play (a coup for TAS because smaller troupes rarely attract celeb…
To describe what makes Mark Schultz’s Everything Will Be Different such a magnificent piece of writing is to give away the tricks that are at the very core of its achievement. To simply detail its plot is to diminish this unique and perverse little play’s dark power. Fortunately, its Stray…
There’s no preaching in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, A Parable, which is set in a Catholic boys’ school in 1964. Its story concerns that ages-old tradition of priests molesting little boys, but its aim is to address not the various horrors of that issue, but rather the difference between what…
I had a subscription to TV Guide when I was a kid, and I remember looking forward each September to the magazine’s annual Fall Preview issue, in which the editors devoted a page to each of the new season’s network shows. Shows like Mr. T and Tina always sounded better…
