In our groundhog-free city, the astronomically defined season of spring can still be rather delightful, even if the weather doesn’t feel that much different from autumn or even winter. Skies are blue, everything smells good (well, better than usual, anyway), and our typically understated vegetation is at its greenest, fluffiest…
After what seemed like a very long time, Phoenix Theatre’s production of Pippin stopped shrieking and wiggling its collective hips, and shuddered to a close. Meanwhile, we — an audience made up mostly of “people of a certain age” — endured a lifeless rip-off of Cirque du Soleil staged by…
The Hormel Festival of New Plays and Musicals at Phoenix Theatre gives theatergoers a rare opportunity to check out new plays and musicals in the works and to offer insight to the directors, actors, and producers on how that particular work could improve. With a range of themes and styles,…
The setup: Like Danny, the hero of his currently popular play The Submission, writer Jeff Talbott is a Yale Drama School grad who’s finished a handful of full-length scripts that haven’t really gone anywhere — until now. (Talbott does have a festival reading of his newest work, A Public Education,…
The setup: In her diverse 30+-year career, writer-comedian-educator-activist Monica Palacios, a.k.a. the Surfer Chola, has not written a whole lot of plays (though she’s helped others make hundreds of theater pieces) — she’s more of a lecturer, standup/solo performance artist, blogger, essayist, and magazine-style journalista making queer Latinahood something that’s…
Andy Kindler speaks his mind, often at length and with great detail. “I’m famous for my long-winded responses,” the comedian, known for his recurring roles on Bob’s Burgers, Wizards of Waverly Place, Everybody Loves Raymond, says laughing. Kindler is a stand-up vet. A joke-teller for nearly three decades, he often…
The setup: 1949’s South Pacific, based on a few of the stories in James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, is Rodgers & Hammerstein’s third big show to completely change the face of the American musical (a genre that typically had made even less sense before). Instantly both a blockbuster…
Jomar Mesquita’s Dolores begins with a lone woman, arms outstretched and eyes closed, spinning in circles around the stage. Her full red skirt billows out around her thighs as the dulcet tones of “Cucurrucucu Paloma” gently waft over the audience. I was pretty much sold from the start. The Brazilian-based…
“Getting older makes me a better artist,” says playwright Monica Palacios, with absolutely no irony. “The stories I’m telling now I couldn’t have told 20 years ago.” Palacios’ latest story, Clock, is about to open at Teatro Bravo. Directed by ASU’s Marivel Danielson, Clock tells the story of a Latina…
The setup: Since 2014 began, it seems we theatergoers have faced down an awful lot of family dysfunction depicted on Valley stages — especially if you count The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth, which one probably should. You ought to hang in there for one more real masterpiece, though…
Several nice plays opened here last weekend. What’s more, there was a lot of chatter among theater types about the bazillion or so dollars donated to one of our local playhouses. But if culturally minded people remember anything about Valentine’s weekend, 2014, it will be this: That was the weekend…
Several nice plays opened here last weekend. What’s more, there was a lot of chatter among theater types about the bazillion or so dollars donated to one of our local playhouses. But if culturally minded people remember anything about Valentine’s weekend, 2014, it will be this: That was the weekend…
The setup: Not everything that takes the Manhattan theater scene by storm (besides the polar vortex) is a musical extravaganza or a heavy, thoughtful, or surreal drama. One of the hottest tickets right now is C. Denby Swanson’s The Norwegians, a fairly ridiculous short comedy that opened off-off-Broadway at The…
The setup: Nina Raine’s thought-provoking Tribes, about a typically troubled family whose deaf adult son, Billy, illuminates further hurt when he discovers the Deaf community he’s been denied, has been acclaimed since it premièred in London in 2010. Winner of New York’s 2012 Drama Desk Award for Best Play, the…
Big things are afoot for Raychel Diane Weiner. The Ballet Arizona company dancer was recently cast in Flesh and Bone, an upcoming Starz dance drama created, written, and produced by Moira Walley-Beckett, who produced and wrote for Breaking Bad. Not much has been revealed about the show — except that…
“It’s like we’re kittens in lion costumes.” That’s how Whitney Cummings describes the one part vulnerability to two parts adrenaline that is stand-up comedy. Like any good comedian, she brings her personal experiences to the stage, specifically the unspoken good, bad, and ugly of relationships. As Cummings wraps up her…
Most of us don’t have a spare Benjamin or two nowadays to drop on a fundraising gala, even for those causes dear to our hearts, even if it’s deductible at the end of the year. Also, it’s usually no picnic (literally) to nosh on banquet food or stand around in…
The setup: Tracy Letts’ epic, relentlessly dismal yet moving and entertaining August: Osage County won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and came through Tempe on a national tour four years ago. Since then, Julia Roberts and Ewan McGregor have grown old enough to play middle-aged in the film version…
The setup: Mary’s Wedding is a contemporary play set during and just after World War I. This partially historic romance/dream/action adventure about a young Canadian couple has been the most widely produced play in Canada in the decade since its première…
As Danny Tanner on the family-friendly Full House and the host of YouTube predecessor America’s Funniest Home Videos, Bob Saget spent much of the 1980s and ’90s as America’s dad — a fun-loving 30-something with a knowing look and a smile. These days, the same 12-year-old girls who watched him…
CONDER/dance’s Breaking Ground took over the Tempe Center for the Arts for two nights this past weekend in hopes of highlighting choreographers and videographers on the cutting edge of the contemporary dance scene. If diversity was the end goal, the show was a raging success…
The setup: In my old, crumbly Folger Library The Taming of the Shrew that I grabbed for a quarter to get through school, there’s an introductory essay about how William Shakespeare never meant to suggest that enhanced coercive techniques such as food and sleep deprivation, manufactured cognitive dissonance, and the…
