Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris is a musical revue that became an off-Broadway staple nearly 30 years ago. Truth be told, Jacques Brel is quite dead. If he weren’t, Todd James Smeltzer Productions’ current version of this tired homage to the late Belgian lyricist might…
All in the Timing, a collection of six short one-acts now being staged by Actors Theatre of Phoenix, exploded off-Broadway a couple of seasons ago. It snagged a spot on Time magazine’s 1995 “Ten Best” list and made an overnight star of its author, David Ives. Critics heaped praise on…
It’s becoming more difficult to crow about live theatre in Phoenix. For a couple of years, it looked like the local theatre scene was evolving away from the sort of mask-and-wig clubs that trotted out another production of Blithe Spirit every season. Small, daring new troupes were unfolding every couple…
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not the most amusing of William Shakespeare’s comedies. It’s clumsily constructed and makes an awkward shift into melodrama toward the end of the first act. All that makes Arizona Theatre Company’s colossal production of the 16th-century satire all the more impressive. Frankly, I’ve had…
It’s no mystery why Lionel Bart’s Oliver! is occasionally trotted out for another go-around. This classic British musical, adapted from Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel Oliver Twist, features some wonderfully bent characters and a magnificent score. The real puzzle is why Southwest Shakespeare Company is producing this show, which has no…
There are better reasons to strap on a bustle than Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Something, perhaps the popularity of the film versions, has convinced theatre producers that people want to see this play. But while both the 1988 movie based on Hampton’s dramatization and 1989’s Valmont were small masterpieces…
Nowadays, send-ups of old movie musicals tend to play about as well as the films they spoof. There are enough such satires that they’ve become a subgenre themselves; we’ve seen so many stage, film and television takeoffs on Busby Berkeley, et al., that the lines between the parodies and their…
Immediately before the opening-night performance of Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, downtown was appropriately drenched by one of Phoenix’s surprise monsoon thunderstorms. Through much of the first act, audience members dried out in Planet Earth’s stuffy, hangarlike theatre space, while the usual suspects romped through a…
Opening night of Guv: The Emperor Strikes Back, the New Scottsdale Playhouse was half empty when the curtain rose on this much-anticipated sequel to 1990’s Guv: The Musical. Perhaps all the local Democrats had headed for Sun City to witness President Clinton’s campaign stop there. It’s just as well. Watching…
About two thirds of the way into Christopher Durang’s 1987 comedy Laughing Wild, the Infant of Prague appears. He comes not as a miraculous apparition or an ornate symbol of retribution, but as a guest on a daytime talk show. While He is grilled by a woman who may or…
If you love to be enraged by art like Phoenix Art Museum’s recent exhibit about the American flag or the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, you really should head over to Mercury Theater in Mesa to catch the granddaddy of all in-your-face concupiscence, Aristophanes’ ribald comedy Lysistrata. In this play, the…
The classic French bedroom farce was invented almost a hundred years ago by Georges Feydeau. The form features a complicated plot that unfolds at breakneck speed, punctuated with quick exits through slamming doors. The subject is invariably sex or, more precisely, infidelity. Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, recently seen at Theater…
When Five Women Wearing the Same Dress played earlier this season at In Mixed Company, it was greeted with such hosannas that it now has been transferred to the relatively bigtime venue of Stage West at Herberger Theater Center. Mercifully, I was away during the original engagement and so, innocent…
June is the month Hallmark has told us we should wax sentimental over Dad. In reality, the towering figure of a father can be a forbidding presence from a child’s perspective. Men are traditionally reticent about revealing their feelings, so a child may be mystified by a father’s behavior. What…
It is a joy to report the birth of a new theatre in Phoenix, especially one that shows such promise in its pedigree. The group is called The Ensemble Theatre, founded by “actors and artists who have all returned to Arizona and our artistic roots.” This lineage can be traced…
Lynn Redgrave is starring in a play she wrote about her troubled relationship with her famous father, directed by her own husband. The play deals with the emotional remoteness and larger-than-life persona of the celebrated British actor Sir Michael Redgrave. When Redgrave decides to spill her guts in public, it’s…
Neil Simon is the most popular playwright in American theatre history. He has written some 27 plays for Broadway, accumulating close to 17,000 performances. Valley audiences now have a chance to see two of his better plays in revival at two local theatres, giving us the opportunity to contrast early…
As a dislocated audience, Phoenix’s theatre fans have to employ a bit of guesswork when it comes to buying Broadway theatre tickets. Stuck somewhere between believing the hype and becoming abject cynics, Valley theatregoers select their shows gingerly. Hype has it that 1996 is the best season on Broadway in…
Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love is possibly the dramatist’s most accessible play–simple, potent, lyrically charged and highly actable–yet it suffers from the limitation of a fairly static situation, and characters to match. Eddie, a cowboy, and May, the young woman in and out of whose life he wanders, squabble and…
The program of Italian Funerals & Other Festive Occasions tells us that the author, John Miranda, is an actor. The discerning audience member could have guessed that because plays written by actors usually share certain characteristics. When actors take up the pen, the play tends to be sentimental. You can…
Can an actor’s performance be too good for a play? Apparently it can, if one performance so overwhelms the script that the depth and subtlety of the drama are eclipsed by the charisma of its star. Such seemed to be the case when I saw the touring production of Herb…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: “When the gods wish to punish us, they grant our prayers.” For the past two seasons, I have been thumping a drum, decrying the decreased relevance of theatre to contemporary culture. Now, In Mixed Company has taken me at my word and is presenting a play…
