When German expressionist choreographer Susanne Linke visited Senegal in 1998, her collaboration with the men of Compagnie Jant-Bi produced Le Coq est Mort (The Cock Is Dead). And this Euro-African dance theater production, coming to Gammage Auditorium on Wednesday, April 11, is a 70-minute tour de force worth crowing about.The…
Arizona Opera’s last offering, Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment, was slim and frothy to the point of forgettability. No one is likely to have the same complaints about the season finale, Don Carlo, whatever else may be said about it. This work by Giuseppe Verdi — or, as generations…
After seeing her performance in In Mixed Company’s Pterodactyls, I have scratched Barbara McGrath from my list of Actors I’d Rather Not See On Stage Ever Again. McGrath’s star turn in Nicky Silver’s dark comedy has wiped away my memory of her last several attempts at acting, which I found…
Ever since Arizona Theatre Company announced early last year that it had optioned Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves, I’ve been wondering: Why? This threadbare marriage comedy is usually seen, on those occasions when it’s trotted out, at tiny community houses, where audiences are more tolerant of pale pleasantries…
Very occasionally, one of our local companies produces a perfect evening of theater. The first indication that Actors Theatre of Phoenix had weighed in with a contender came when the curtain rose on Jeff Thomson’s breathtaking set design for The Archbishop’s Ceiling. The first-night audience burst into excited applause and…
If the measure of a good play is its ability to evoke emotion, then Love Waits is a stunning success. The play’s teeny opening-night audience (I was joined by five patrons and an AriZoni adjudicator, one of those poor souls charged with judging plays for a dubious local theater awards…
Forget that I’m an atheist. Or that the last time I heard a disco song I liked was nearly a quarter-century ago. My objections to God’s Trombones are strictly critical. In its new production of this terribly contemporary musical, Black Theatre Troupe delivers a loud but largely ill-conceived collection of…
Having given us opera’s all-time greatest bad girl earlier this season with Carmen, Arizona Opera has been taking pains to compensate, with two heroines in a row so goody-goody that Jeanette MacDonald might find them square. First there was Minnie, The Girl of the Golden West, holding Bible study for…
Two nude dancers pace ritualistically toward an offstage light, their bodies breathtakingly painted by tattoo artist George Long. It takes hours to perfect these full-body tattoos before each performance, and you can only imagine the loving care Long must give to each curlicue that encircles the cheeks of the dancers’…
In Ira Levin’s stage mystery Deathtrap, a playwright glumly declares a rival’s play so good that a talented director couldn’t hurt it. That’s how good the best works of Gilbert and Sullivan are. Take, for instance, The Gondoliers, or The King of Barataria. Not, perhaps, on the level of The…
Those of us foolish enough to have left our handkerchiefs at home exited last week’s matinee of Wit wet-faced and weary. Arizona Theatre Company’s production of this extraordinary play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1999, is an emotionally exhausting hour and a half.Both entertaining and intellectually challenging,…
I’ve been dodging invitations to see the Oxymoron’Z improvisational troupe for nearly a decade. The materials, faxed or sometimes mailed to me by the group’s founder and guru, Louis Anthony Russo, promised “great big laughs” and “spontaneous fun.” It sounded to me like quite the opposite, and year after year…
The enormous pleasure of American Safari begins even before the curtain rings up on this nostalgic pseudo-comedy. As playgoers settle into their seats at the Herberger Theater Center’s Stage West, a picnic table sails dreamily around the stage, attended by a smiling couple who silently toast one another with Kool-Aid…
Linda Eder sounds bored. If what her publicist says is true, Eder would probably rather be out riding one of her horses than yakking long-distance with another journalist about her career as a fabulous Broadway star. Perhaps in the hope of speeding up the interview, Eder quickly mentions her upcoming…
“Comedy workshop,” said the marquee outside the Tempe Improv. The comedian working in the shop wasn’t named, but the crowd was lined up hours before showtime even so. The Unknown Comic it wasn’t. No, 13 years after he christened the venue, Jerry Seinfeld, quite probably the biggest star in American…
If fame is fleeting, it also has its own geography. While New York types and theater buffs the world over revere Stephen Schwartz as a superstar, much of the rest of the world has never heard of him. Although he’s among the most successful composers working today, and despite a…
It is, one might argue, the original Spaghetti Western. Especially considering that it’s the work’s Arizona Opera première, the company’s current staging of La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) is an irony-rich experience — sitting in Tucson, the heart of six-shooter country, listening to cowboy-hatted lawmen…
Deep in the heart of Scottsdale, tucked into a forgotten strip mall, tiny Metro Theatre — home to the often brilliant but financially troubled Ensemble Theatre — is bustling tonight. While Ensemble shows generally play to half-empty houses, this second-night performance is teeming, its capacity crowd spilling onto the makeshift…
When I first saw Glen Velez perform at Philadelphia’s 1987 New Music America Festival, I knew I was seeing and hearing a drummer who made his own beat. Clearly, he inhabited his music and his music inhabited him. No one else sounds quite like him. In those years, Velez was…
Halfway through Black Theatre Troupe’s Waiting to Be Invited, I decided that the three women seated in front of me were more entertaining than the three women emoting up onstage. The actors were giving it their all, but turgid direction and a talky script were doing them in. My trio…
If there’s a heaven, it surely contains a room with David Ira Goldstein’s name on the door. Goldstein has, with Arizona Theatre Company’s new production of H.M.S. Pinafore, resuscitated Gilbert and Sullivan’s most beguiling operetta without deflating its integrity. The director has done away with the stale, mannered nonsense that…
Women from other countries were everywhere in the packed house — women from Congo, Sudan, Chad, Burkina Faso, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq. The circumstances that had brought them to the Valley, and to the audience of Essential Theatre’s Playback Theatre performance last weekend at PlayWright’s Theatre, were not pleasant.They were there…
