In 431 B.C., Euripides’ Medea took last place in an annual festival of plays held in honor of the god Dionysus. Although the dramatist usually took top honors in this contest, the judges were loath to give high marks to a play in which a mother kills her own children…
The last time you looked, the Orpheum Theatre was probably either boarded up or maybe hosting a concert by your favorite rock band, say R.E.M. But last week, after a 12-year-long, $14 million fix-up, the formerly run-down vaudeville house was reopened as a mirror image of its younger self. Its…
There’s nothing worse than bad Shakespeare. A successful mounting of any of the Bard’s plays requires confident acting and a director and cast with a detailed knowledge of the material. Nevertheless, a pair of local stages have been overtaken by comedies of error that provide abundant laughs–both intentional and otherwise–at…
There are more reasons not to see Shear Madness than there are alternate endings to the play. The device of this senseless shriek fest, which is now playing at Theater League’s New Scottsdale Playhouse, is that it allows its audience to select one of four different wind-ups to its highly…
On opening night of Phoenix Theatre’s production of Chapter Two, when its star Kathy Fitzgerald took her final bows, she received what could only be called conventional first-night applause. One could be excused for having expected a rafter-shaking ovation. This was, after all, Fitzgerald’s first new role since she returned…
The king of Seventies comedy still reigns in Phoenix: Rare is the community theater company that each season doesn’t feature one of Neil Simon’s plays. What’s baffling is that they’re about as pertinent as a pet rock. But even more perplexing than the popularity of Simon’s shopworn comedies is the…
In his critically hailed HBO special that aired in June, Chris Rock joked about how people say what they think other people want to hear. For example, he noted, nobody really wants to be an organ donor–people just say they do. Organ donation is for people with no faith, he…
If theater is a microcosm of the universe, then we must be a godforsaken, consumer-driven society, more interested in what’s under the tree than how it came to grow there. I’m not a Christian, but I’m concerned with the low state of holiday plays in our fair city: Not one…
Theater has been braving the AIDS pandemic for more than a decade. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in 1985 was the first of a subgenre of plays that has evolved beyond commentary on the crisis to a more artful form of entertainment. Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, which is being…
Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre has made a name for itself with overwrought dramas and dark translations of prominent plays. Whether this uncommon company is presenting a contemporary comedy or a Shakespearean tragedy, its productions are distinguished by stacks of video screens and crowds of women in singed nightgowns, stroking potfuls…
The title is Accelerando, but the current production at Arizona State University’s Prism Theatre isn’t a musical. It’s a romance, of sorts. She (Roxane Policare) and He (Stan Weightman Jr.) are young New Yorkers who meet at a party. They go back to his place, undress, and tussle under the…
The strengths of Sam Shepard’s plays are in the peculiar humor he brings to them. In most of his better-known work, the playwright/actor blends comedy and tragedy, pulling laughs from unseemly places. A new staging of Shepard’s True West that’s produced by a local movie company called Sudden Death Pictures…
No one would be served by the suggestion that Mesa Little Theatre’s The Pinchpenny Phantom of the Opera is a sterling production, or even that there could be a sterling production of this sophomoric spoof by Dave Reiser and Jack Sharkey. That wonderful title suggests that we may get to…
Early in the beautifully written first act of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, one of the characters says to another, “I remember everything!” To which the other replies, “That must be a burden.” Albee, at 68, knows that memory can be a wily, artful thing, and freeing oneself of one’s…
I didn’t much like The Cocktail Hour, which surprised me. Not only because it’s one of the more amusing and sophisticated of A.R. Gurney’s comedies, but because the company presenting the play–and the director who staged it–normally offers more muscular fare. This time out, director Betty St. George and her…
With its current production, Arizona Jewish Theatre Company has managed to cram both comedy and tragedy onto the same stage. The comedy is Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig. The tragedy is that this nearly three-hour-long play is enormously unfunny. Wasserstein’s relentless comedy concerns a trio of sisters who gather to…
Patient A is a small, infrequently produced play about the life and death of Kimberly Bergalis. Bergalis died in 1991 from complications of AIDS, which she presumably contracted from her dentist. Her case became national news and Bergalis a media figure and penultimate “innocent victim.” In this solemn one-act–presented by…
Phoenix Theatre’s current production, Dial M for Murder, pits a killer against a mystery writer/police inspector team, but the plot is no puzzler. My mystery-writer friend and seatmate Karol had the whole plot figured out in the first act when the leading lady (Heidi Ewart) sat down to work on…
August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is among the most stirring dramas written this century. The critically acclaimed play, about a black American family’s struggle to come to terms with its legacy of slavery, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1990. It is Wilson’s intention to write a play…
I’ve been a big fan of Paul Rudnick’s writing ever since I read his first novel, Social Disease, in the early Eighties. That book, and most of Rudnick’s subsequent work (the play I Hate Hamlet; several screenplays, including the two Addams Family movies; and his hilarious monthly movie column in…
I hate mimes. Who doesn’t? Say “mime” and I think of Marcel Marceau. Or worse, Shields and Yarnell. No matter who, it’ll be white face and a striped tee shirt and those loose-limbed bits with titles like “Climbing the Stairs” or “Walking Against the Wind.” Right? Not anymore according to…
Phoenix is lousy with Shakespeare this week. At Herberger Theater Center, Arizona Theatre Company’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona trods the boards. Macbeth is snorting and pawing the ground at Arizona State University’s Paul V. Galvin Playhouse. And over at Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre, both Hamlet and Macbeth–by way of…
