The first weekend of the theater season looked like show business as usual. Phoenix Theatre was kicking off its 78th year with another tried-and-true musical; Theater Works was tackling a show beyond its limited means; and Planet Earth was providing its usual quirky, black-box alternative to both of the above…
I once interviewed a film actress who was attempting a comeback with her own television show. “I always tell people that I do this for the art, for the love of the craft, all that hogwash,” she told me. “The truth is, I started practicing my acceptance speech when I…
Pageant is not a drag show. Although its leads are all women played by men in wigs and dresses, this kitschy comedy isn’t aimed at gay audiences or fans of cross-dressing. Pageant plays it straight, its premise closer to the real-life beauty contests it spoofs than the drag fest it’s…
I was one of those guys holding his head and groaning when, in the early Eighties, Ted Turner and his pals began colorizing classic films. I hated that notion of making old movies more accessible to young audiences from the get-go, but it took me a little longer to get…
Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame formula does not apply to undiscovered playwrights. They get only seven minutes, if they’re lucky, rarely get their work read or produced, and are seldom heard from beyond tiny theater circles. Phoenix, ever a cultural backwater, has founded few programs aimed at nurturing up-and-coming…
Say what you will about the state of theater in Phoenix; at least our mask and wig clubs know their limitations. I’ve seen smallish Los Angeles companies cram colossal shows onto postage-stamp-size stages (most memorably a production of Showboat, shoehorned into a 100-seat house), but community theaters here typically work…
In Hollywood, sequels are compulsory. Live theater, unlike Tinseltown, tends to be more selective about revisiting its characters and stories. Most of the time, anyway. A . . . My Name Is Still Alice, currently onstage at Phoenix Theatre, is the sequel to A . . . My Name Is…
If it isn’t surprising that this theater season began and ended with Neil Simon plays, it’s at least comforting that both of them–if not the half-dozen other Simon comedies foisted on us in between–were adequately executed. Arizona Jewish Theatre Company’s Broadway Bound wraps up a season that began last September…
Would that every local theater company could afford nine-month rehearsal periods for each of its shows. Then maybe every production would be as noteworthy as In Mixed Company’s Out Cry, now playing at downtown’s Third Street Theatre. Director David Barker, who’s known for making difficult theater accessible to non-theater audiences,…
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a nearly faultless play, a beautifully written, deeply disturbing pageant of human frailty that builds to a startling climax. None of this is apparent in Phoenix Theatre’s current production. Our oldest local playhouse has fumbled Williams’ prize-winning sex drama so badly that it…
If you go see Arizona Theatre Company’s production of Moliere’s Scapin, you may leave the theater wishing it were possible to stay and, moviehouse fashion, see the play again. That’s mostly because this show is so entertaining, but also because it spins by so fast, you never figured out what…
A middle-aged man enters the living room of his opulent Manhattan apartment. He is followed by a beautiful young woman. They discuss his wife, who isn’t home; they share witty banter about the park where the man has apparently just picked up the woman. After a while, the woman declares…
I waited to see Personals until a couple of weeks before it closed, and ended up wishing I’d gone sooner. I’d grown weary of the standard fare presented by Theater League, a company that each month dusts off another musty musical (this season alone it’s done Hello, Dolly!, Jesus Christ…
If there’s anything wrong with Steven Dietz’s plays, it’s that they’re so complex that audiences rarely agree on what they’re about. This isn’t a bad thing. In a town where theater companies repeatedly haul out Blithe Spirit and where any road company of Cats is guaranteed a sellout, a production…
My dissatisfaction with Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years is not about the quality of its production. The show’s current interpretation by Phoenix Theatre is well-acted and–with the exception of some dreadful age makeup–a technically proficient version of this well-regarded Broadway hit. But playwright Emily Mann’s adaptation…
It’s too bad that theater audiences aren’t usually interested in the evolution of a play. If they were, the new Guillermo Reyes comedy, now playing at Arizona State University’s Lyceum Theatre, could sell tickets as a specimen of a project that’s on its way to being a funny, thought-provoking piece…
For the first time in the seven years I’ve attended Planet Earth Theatre, I was not ushered to my seat by a drooling, incense-burning harpy. I was not panhandled in the lobby nor handed a program riddled with typos. More important, I was not made to sit through two hours…
Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s claim that its new play is “the biggest downtown Phoenix event preceding the opening of Bank One Ballpark” seems like something of an overstatement. Still, I’m hard-pressed to think of anything happening downtown that’s more stimulating than Below the Belt, Richard Dresser’s demented comedy about big…
It’s no longer enough that several legitimate stages are regularly afflicted with bad theater. Now it’s tailing us to the places where we go to eat and shop, as well. Just a week or so ago at a local mall, a man dressed as a taco followed me to my…
When he wrote Moon Over Buffalo, Ken Ludwig must have been counting on an audience that hadn’t seen the dozen or so funnier plays and movies that have been hung on similar show-biz hooks. And Phoenix Theatre seems to be hoping its ticketholders won’t be distracted by the shuddering sense…
The smallish audience with whom I saw Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: The Stage Production seemed, on the whole, to enjoy it. I say this in the interest of fairness, before I confess that I fled the theater after the second act–the end of the “Gold Watch” segment. The show made…
In the past, I’ve carped about Arizona Jewish Theatre Company’s lamentable productions and its less-than-kosher choice of material. But the company more than makes up for past indiscretions with its current staging of Jonathan Tolins’ modern morality play The Twilight of the Golds. Unlike AJTC’s usual lite fare, Twilight is…
