The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow provides proof that a talented cast can sometimes triumph over mediocre material. The good folks at Actors Theatre have pulled out all the stops in an attempt to patch the elephant-size holes in Rolin Jones’ high-concept comedy about a troubled girl who’s trying to…
Fat Pig: Tom is surprised to find himself falling in love with Helen, an intelligent, witty, and very overweight librarian. His friends and colleagues don’t approve, and rather than forging ahead with a post-PC “love is love, darn it” attitude, he hides his romance with Helen in Neil LaBute’s sassy,…
Thirty years ago, it was considered clever to spoof obscure science-fiction films. Stage musicals like The Rocky Horror Show and movies like Phantom of the Paradise were all the rage, and movie nerds who knew our George Pal and our Herschell Gordon Lewis felt vindicated in our passion for cheesy…
Yours, Anne: It sounds like the punch line to an unfortunate joke, but this musical adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank is utterly serious. Presented as a song cycle rather than a traditional book musical, Yours, Anne presents Frank’s legendary journal as a series of dramatic scenes set to…
I’ve seen three plays about mothers and daughters this month — two of them just this past week. Pearls: Motherhood Unstrung collects monologues by and about mothers, authored by local writers and read by local actors. The Last Lists of My Mad Mother, about a middle-aged woman dealing with her…
Suds: Local critics haven’t much liked this goofball extravaganza of tunes from the 1960s, and who can blame them? Of the innumerable inane musical revues that attempt to wrap era-specific pop songs around a slim story, this one’s the hokiest. To sell its silly tale of a Laundromat owner who…
A Chorus Line: That tried-and-true celebration of the unsung heroes of American musical theater, the chorus boys and gals, is traipsing back into town — and this time it comes with an entree! The second-longest-running show in Broadway history won both a Tony and a Pulitzer and features the now-classic…
A traffic cop yelled at me on my way into the theater the other night. He blew his whistle and shouted at me because I was crossing against the light on one of the several hundred streets that have been rendered useless by the light-rail project. I don’t think police…
The good news is that no theater company has announced a production of Cats this season. The bad news is that every single other tired old musical ever written will make its way to local stages over the next several months. Surprise! And welcome to the 2006-2007 theater season, which…
Pearls: Motherhood Unstrung: This tribute to moms and momism is culled from a collection of essays by the students of Mothers Who Write, a creative writing workshop for mothers sponsored by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. The play incorporates pieces both comic and tragic about divorce, finding God, and…
It’s not unfathomable that Richard Greenberg’s exuberantly chatty Take Me Out won all the big-deal theater awards in 2003. Greenberg’s supple use of language and powerful characterizations make this an entertaining, if not especially enlightening, mediation on oft-trod themes. Fine actors will certainly continue to bring to this play better…
The Hispanick Zone: This comedy, written and directed by Teatro Bravo founder Guillermo Reyes, launches the company’s new season. Set in Arizona in 2006 and told in sketch comedy format, it depicts the world (and the Legislature) as ruled by humorless people. Reyes spoofs assimilation, deportation, and the hotties of…
I Do! I Do! is a musical with a beard a mile long, which is almost certainly why it’s part of Theater Works’ summer stock season. This 20-year-old troupe caters mostly to the blue-hairs of Sun City, where “risky” means any show in which someone turns up in a peignoir…
Proof: Fountain Hills Community Theatre leapt to the fore and rescued Is What It Is Theatre’s doomed swan song after its own theater space was sold out from under the troupe. The result is a short, single-weekend run of David Auburn’s family drama, which takes its name from a mathematical…
I’ve nearly recovered from having seen a dinner theater production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast in east Mesa last week. My headache, which began shortly after Anthony Majewski began singing, is almost gone. My stomachache (which wasn’t caused by anything I ate, since I skipped the dinner portion of…
1740 The first version of Beauty and the Beast, by Madame Gabrielle de Villeneuve, appears. Villeneuve’s version doesn’t end with the transformation of the Prince, who remains ugly — and grumpy about it, too. 1756 A newer, more cautionary (and much more sexist) version of the tale by Madame Le…
West Side Story: This deeply sincere take on Arthur Laurents’ landmark musical thankfully never tries to impersonate the movie version, which is what audiences who attend West Side Story often want. Instead, Desert Stages’ Sharks and Jets dance like kids actually might if they were trapped in Hell’s Kitchen and…
One produces or appears in West Side Story at one’s own risk, and not only because it’s trotted out with the frequency of a Seattle rain shower. Most folks coming to see the Arthur Laurents/Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim classic are fans of the famous film, and illogically expect to be taken…
Any second now, the nice folks over at the ariZoni Awards will start handing out bowling trophies to anyone who’s come within three feet of a theater stage this season. Therefore, welcome to the Second Annual Robbie Awards, which celebrate actual accomplishments — and acknowledge some really low points —…
Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: These adapted adventures feature music and lyrics by Roger Miller and a book by William Hauptman, but retain Mark Twain’s deeply moral depictions of the 19th-century social tapestry. Twain scholars probably don’t head for dinner theaters often, but those who do in this…
Before I tell you why and how quickly you should go to see Nearly Naked Theater’s nearly perfect (and almost entirely clad!) production of The Who’s Tommy, I had better come clean: I don’t like modern dance. All that flailing and hopping and mimicking of shape and form; all that…
June 1969 Tommy, a double-album rock opera by The Who, is released. At first banned by the BBC and certain U.S. radio stations (probably because of the child abuse that features so prominently in its story), it eventually reaches #4 on the U.S. Billboard album charts and #2 in the…
