Imagine being trapped in a tiny room full of people who cannot sing but insist on doing so anyway (at the top of their lungs!), and you’ll understand my discomfort while confronting Desert Stages’ Suds last month. This is one of those musical revues — and they are legion —…
Forced to give a name to the past year in theater, I would have to call it The Year of Ron May, because while many of his compatriots struggled to act, direct, run a credible theater or even just handle publicity for one, this quadruple-threat actor/director/artistic director/publicist excelled at each…
42nd Street: On the avenue they’re taking you to . . . the one where the girl goes out a dancer “but comes back a star!” This popular musical has been revived countless times, but it’s still best known in its original context: as the classic Warner Bros. tuner in…
It’s finally happened. Joseph Kremer has at last appeared in a role that he’s not able to make his own. Kremer, who arrived seemingly out of nowhere a couple of seasons ago, has tackled — and excelled at! — roles as diverse as a sleazy French aristocrat in Les Liaisons…
I couldn’t tell if the holiday choir that kicked off the surprisingly dreary Sister’s Christmas Catechism: The Mystery of the Magi’s Gold was for real or not. Are they deliberately off-key, I wondered, and that’s the joke? My uncertainty grew as this overlong evening dragged on and on. How, I…
Wishes, Wassail, and Wonder: Don’t let its super-cheesy title fool you: iTheatre Collaborative’s fourth annual Christmas cabaret is in on its own joke, and may well be your best bet for kicky holiday entertainment with an edge. Shot through with caustic comic turns, this Yule-themed New York-style cabaret cobbles together…
Toward the end of Act One of Arizona Theatre Company’s Jitney, Chuck Patterson positions himself near the lip of center stage and recites a monologue about a dream that Fielding, the character he plays in this August Wilson play, has recently had. His recollection of climbing a golden ladder up…
Tuna Christmas: It’s back: that better-than-most holiday sequel to Greater Tuna, this one about Christmas in Tuna, the third smallest town in Texas. The good news is that the script for this Yuletide comedy is full of dark, cynical jabs at both the holidays and small-town life. It starts out…
If I lie very still and focus all my attention on the tiny water stain on the ceiling above my bed, I’m able to forget the dream for minutes at a time. The dream — a nightmare, really — has been with me since this afternoon, when I awakened from…
Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge: Originally commissioned by City Theatre in Pittsburgh and successfully presented during the 2002 holiday season, Christopher Durang’s profoundly irreverent play is a demented version of the perennial Dickens Christmas classic. This time, nasty old Ebenezer Scrooge finds that a visitation from three dead friends…
The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow provides proof that a talented cast can sometimes triumph over mediocre material. The good folks at Actors Theatre have pulled out all the stops in an attempt to patch the elephant-size holes in Rolin Jones’ high-concept comedy about a troubled girl who’s trying to…
Fat Pig: Tom is surprised to find himself falling in love with Helen, an intelligent, witty, and very overweight librarian. His friends and colleagues don’t approve, and rather than forging ahead with a post-PC “love is love, darn it” attitude, he hides his romance with Helen in Neil LaBute’s sassy,…
Thirty years ago, it was considered clever to spoof obscure science-fiction films. Stage musicals like The Rocky Horror Show and movies like Phantom of the Paradise were all the rage, and movie nerds who knew our George Pal and our Herschell Gordon Lewis felt vindicated in our passion for cheesy…
Yours, Anne: It sounds like the punch line to an unfortunate joke, but this musical adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank is utterly serious. Presented as a song cycle rather than a traditional book musical, Yours, Anne presents Frank’s legendary journal as a series of dramatic scenes set to…
I’ve seen three plays about mothers and daughters this month — two of them just this past week. Pearls: Motherhood Unstrung collects monologues by and about mothers, authored by local writers and read by local actors. The Last Lists of My Mad Mother, about a middle-aged woman dealing with her…
Suds: Local critics haven’t much liked this goofball extravaganza of tunes from the 1960s, and who can blame them? Of the innumerable inane musical revues that attempt to wrap era-specific pop songs around a slim story, this one’s the hokiest. To sell its silly tale of a Laundromat owner who…
A Chorus Line: That tried-and-true celebration of the unsung heroes of American musical theater, the chorus boys and gals, is traipsing back into town — and this time it comes with an entree! The second-longest-running show in Broadway history won both a Tony and a Pulitzer and features the now-classic…
A traffic cop yelled at me on my way into the theater the other night. He blew his whistle and shouted at me because I was crossing against the light on one of the several hundred streets that have been rendered useless by the light-rail project. I don’t think police…
The good news is that no theater company has announced a production of Cats this season. The bad news is that every single other tired old musical ever written will make its way to local stages over the next several months. Surprise! And welcome to the 2006-2007 theater season, which…
Pearls: Motherhood Unstrung: This tribute to moms and momism is culled from a collection of essays by the students of Mothers Who Write, a creative writing workshop for mothers sponsored by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. The play incorporates pieces both comic and tragic about divorce, finding God, and…
It’s not unfathomable that Richard Greenberg’s exuberantly chatty Take Me Out won all the big-deal theater awards in 2003. Greenberg’s supple use of language and powerful characterizations make this an entertaining, if not especially enlightening, mediation on oft-trod themes. Fine actors will certainly continue to bring to this play better…
The Hispanick Zone: This comedy, written and directed by Teatro Bravo founder Guillermo Reyes, launches the company’s new season. Set in Arizona in 2006 and told in sketch comedy format, it depicts the world (and the Legislature) as ruled by humorless people. Reyes spoofs assimilation, deportation, and the hotties of…
