Last winter, I attended a holiday dance show — one of those Christmas-themed musical pageants where the stage is overtaken by crowds from one dance class after another, mostly prepubescents determined to slog through “Jingle Bell Rock” without forgetting a ball-change or bursting into tears. I really enjoyed this production,…
Space 55 Theatre Ensemble defies pinning down, even in the world of offbeat, tiny companies. The dump they perform in is nowhere near the neighborhoods that are alleged to be bohemian — it’s crammed between some faux loft apartments and ASU Downtown. The folks who run the place are super-multi-talented…
D. Scott Withers made me forget Divine. That’s not easy to do, and not just because I think rather often of the late cross-dressing actor who first played Edna Turnblad in John Waters’ Hairspray. Withers’ performance as Edna in Phoenix Theatre’s Hairspray: The Musical was an entirely new creation, one…
Take note, local weirdos: The priority deadline for 2011 Phoenix Fringe Festival applicants is 10 days from now. PHX:fringe 2011, as its otherwise known, is looking for theater, dance, and performance art peeps to take part in the shebang scheduled to take place from April 1 through April 10. Applications…
Not all children’s shows are grippingly entertaining for grownups, but their audiences always are. Careful eavesdropping on the moppets who attend Childsplay’s Junie B. in Jingle Bells, Batman Smells! will take you back to your own days of wonder and excitement. “Whoa! It’s her school!” exclaimed one girl, when she…
When the Phoenix Center for the Arts partnered up with ASU Downtown’s School of Public Affairs and the Phoenix Center Association, we knew things were about to get seriously creative — and educational. Together, they’re sponsoring the Rise Project, an 8-week, after-school program in urban performing arts. Classes will be…
Film critic Leonard Maltin coined the term Mumbo-Jumbo Quotient (MJQ) in his capsule review of The Matrix, and it comes in handy as a way to describe art that’s so freaking weird that some other element ideally needs to cross into the red zone as well, to balance the weirdness…
“You don’t sing to feel better,” actress Jevetta Steele says at one point in her electrifying lead performance in Arizona Theater Company’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. “You sing because it’s a way of understanding life.” August Wilson understands life. There’s rich, musical proof in the hopeful, often anguished portraits he…
Actor and comedian Dane Cook’s been in movies alongside the likes of Steve Carrell (Dan in Real Life) and Kevin Costner (Mr. Brooks), he’s hosted Saturday Night Live twice, and had a hit comedy album, Retaliation. Now, he’s on tour, and he’ll be bringing his brand of observational humor to…
All living beings deserve respect. On the other hand, if you’re famous and take advantage of it to have a ridiculously bad book published, put on your big-girl panties, because people will make fun of your book and you don’t need to take it personally. That’s what happens during Celebrity…
The inside of the Galvin Playhouse at ASU Tempe smells just awful, like a huge malfunctioning bathroom. (Like sewage, but in a domesticated way — I don’t want to make it sound even worse than it is.) If I were an investigative reporter, I’d try to find out why and…
The Arizona Women’s Theatre Company has supported women playwrights since 2003 and returns this weekend with its annual Pandora Festival — an opportunity for women writers to showcase their full-length, one-act, or 10-minute creations. This year, AWTC is adding a twist. The theatre company will host a Pandora Showcase –…
It turns out that one can, in fact, have too much of a good thing. Witness Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), Actors Theatre’s season opener at the Herberger. This gorgeous, neatly acted production is flawed not in its execution, but in its over-long script, which…
When local group Axé Capoeira Arizona says “Bring your Axé,” they’re not referring to the bladed chopping instrument. Axé (pronounced AH-shay) is a Yourba word meaning “positive energy,” and that’s what Capoeira practitioners will bring to Scottsdale this weekend for the 10th Annual Batizado and Afro-Brazilian Dance Event.Capoeira is a…
Alcoholism is an illness that destroys careers, health, relationships, families, and lives. It keeps both children and adults from growing up strong and functional. Alcohol endangers and kills people, sometimes even when used in moderation. And I can be cynical, snarky, and insensitive (though not quite this bad), so the…
What will be the hottest dance club in Tempe this Saturday night? If you guessed someplace on Mill Avenue, like Crave or Rula Bula, you wouldn’t be too far off. But how about Tempe Center for the Arts? Yes, that beautiful building off Rio Salado Parkway where they usually host…
The hardworking grad-school geniuses of ASU Theatre’s Interrobang program who brought us And What She Found There (which is being revived for one night only on Tuesday, November 9) have formed their own local company, festina lente, and their current workshop, The Revenger’s Tragedy, is scary and sexy, partially masked,…
Thanks to the Cullens and the True Blood crew, there are sure to be more than a few tweens and adults dressed as vampires this Halloween. But we dare you to ask a few of them to work the stage like local dance queen Lisa Starry’s cast from Scorpius Dance…
In Act Two of Moss Hart’s 1948 comedy Light Up the Sky, a group of theater types await the reviews of the opening night performance of their out-of-town play. They’ve already spent the first act gloating about how wise they were to have discovered, produced, or starred in this play,…
Love is weird — I don’t have to belabor that point, right? — and everyone sees and feels it differently, and if you spend more than about two weeks with the same person, things get more and more complex, and it is definitely not like what literature and the arts…
The new Torch Theatre at Central Avenue and Highland is tied up in city bureaucracy, and will not open until late this year or early next year. “It’s still coming along. Obviously, we’re way behind schedule of where we wanted to be. We’re in the process of site plans and…
It’s too bad that Virginia Katherine McMath’s mother turned down the movie contract her daughter was offered at age 6. A career as a child star might have afforded Virginia, who later took the stage name Ginger Rogers, a more interesting backstory. Which would have given playwright Christopher McGovern a…
