Despite his onstage agitation, Bill Burr is in a very good place. The longtime comedian has secured his seat in the who’s-who of stand-up without falling victim to bad TV sitcoms, publicity stunts, and other perils of growing celebrity status. But that’s not to say the man isn’t busy…
Arizona State University’s Hugh Downs School of Human Communication is a milieu where, among other things, a lot of fascinating public performances happen. Way beyond what you might remember from your own college days, when it’s possible you even made fun of communications majors. (We all eventually learned that human…
The setup: After five years on Grand Avenue, utterly disgusting sketch comedy troupe Th [sic] Sense starts its 2013-14 season in the recently fitted Basement Theatre at Phoenix Center for the Arts with a new one-act hellride, Revenge of the Sic…
By Jose Gonzalez Warning: Spoilers follow. This past Sunday, the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad, “Granite State,” seemed to set the stage for tying up of all the loose ends from the past five years in the finale of AMC’s hit TV show. Well, almost every loose end is accounted…
Twenty years ago or more, Phoenix Theatre operated a black box, where those of us who liked edgier plays and musicals could go for offbeat theater. Last week, the now 93-year-old company unveiled, as part of its multimillion-dollar renovation, a new black box space. Those of us who once laughed…
For those of you who missed the Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival, we have some good news and some bad news. The good news: Roastmaster General Jeffrey Ross closed out the four-hour stand-up special by thanking everyone for attending the “2013 Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival.” That subtle denotative remark…
The setup: Alice Childress was a pioneering African-American stage actress of the mid-20th century who also wrote several plays and the well-known young adult novel and film, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich. Her play Wedding Band, which features an interracial relationship in South Carolina during World War I,…
The setup: The traditional info about source material or theater history will not do justice to the extravagant stage musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. So, to build the necessary foundation, here’s some trivia not included in the press packet: It’s allegedly just one of those show-biz coincidences that the…
Next month international performance group Nemcatacoa Teatro will take to the figurative stage for a night of archaeology, art, and exploration at the ASU Deer Valley Rock Art Center. The Colombian performers specialize in performance and street theater and will present Landscape Re-invention Society on Saturday, October 12. They’ll be…
Good ‘N Plenty artist grants were awarded to Stefanie Francis and Ryan Avery over the weekend at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s semi-annual event. The grant was created last year to support “the projects of innovative art makers, wise-crackers and trailblazers based in Arizona.” Grant funding comes from ticket sales…
Tom Green has a tendency to get pretty cerebral. And yes, we’re referring to the same dude who penned “Lonely Swedish (The Bum Bum Song)” and suckled milk directly from a cow’s waiting teat. Green’s comic efforts have always been quite genius — and oftentimes exceptionally madcap — whether the…
The setup: For Curtains’ first visit to Brelby Theatre Company since they finally moved into their leased and rehabbed space in historic Glendale, the troupe presents a show in the Brelby Studio Series, in which unfamiliar plays receive modest productions. Telemachus, Darling is a one-act that, despite featuring a lot…
Nearly Naked Theatre has a tendency to comb through the oeuvres of solid contemporary playwrights and bring us productions of their earliest works, some of which hold up better than others. If you appreciate writer David Lindsay-Abaire mostly from his comparatively serious, Pulitzer-winning Rabbit Hole, presented in Phoenix by Actors…
Nearly Naked Theatre has a tendency to comb through the oeuvres of solid contemporary playwrights and bring us productions of their earliest works, some of which hold up better than others. If you appreciate writer David Lindsay-Abaire mostly from his comparatively serious, Pulitzer-winning Rabbit Hole, presented in Phoenix by Actors…
The setup: Great Arizona Puppet Theater, an outstanding cultural resource since 1983, is currently presenting a revival of one of its most popular original shows, The Princess, the Unicorn, and the Smelly Foot Troll. (Preschool audiences age out of shows within a few years, while another mini-generation has reached toddlerhood…
Look. We know plenty of people want to claim Aidy Bryant as their own. She lives in New York. She made a name for herself in Chicago. But we Phoenicians really should have first dibs on the Saturday Night Live performer. A few reasons: Her fam lives here (her mom…
The setup: Peoria’s Theater Works is right in the middle of their first annual presentation of New Works, so we can’t complain there’s almost nothing to see this month. (Phoenix Theatre has moved its Hormel New Works Festival up to March for 2014, so we didn’t get to enjoy the…
Fans of Bill Burr know him as a regular on podcasts and the late-night comedy circuit. Pop culture pros probably remember him as Kuby, the assistant to Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman, the main comic relief on AMC’s Breaking Bad. His loud, angry comedic style is kind of like a toned…
The dance scene in the Valley is gearing back up after a summer-long hiatus from the grind of rehearsals and performances. But as with many things Phoenix, the dance world can feel disparate and hard to navigate. Lucky for you, we’ve done the hard work and gathered the dance events…
The setup: Many people who are or were cool enough to enjoy midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (in continuous release longer than any other motion picture) don’t know that it started out as an extremely popular stage musical in London. In the Valley alone, I’ve seen productions…
Arizona Theatre Company, the state’s largest producer of professional live stage work, ended its fiscal year June 30 with a $1 million deficit. In the wake of other Valley not-for-profit theaters having gone on hiatus or closed outright due to the recession, largely because of steep dropoffs in corporate giving,…
Say what you will about professional cheerleaders, but these women take their job seriously. And they have to, since being a Phoenix Suns Dancer requires a lot more than just good looks and dance ability. Don’t believe it? We asked veteran Suns Dancer Brittney and Suns Dancer manager Taryn Carmichael…
