No one can accuse Kenneth Lonergan of romanticizing the dilemmas of deluded, self-destructive rich kids. His This Is Our Youth is a gritty, moving, sometimes funny examination of the advantaged that perfectly captures the youthful horrors of the Me Generation. Lonergan’s 1996 play was nominated for a Drama Desk award,…
The Yellow Boat is the true story of a young boy who’s dying, and about how love and art can transform tragedy. It’s a much-produced children’s play that succeeds on several levels: as an educational tool, as a morality tale, and as entertainment for kids and grown-ups. Mostly, though, The…
The heck with Tent City. Sheriff Joe should start sending miscreants to Stagebrush Theatre, where the Scottsdale Community Players have been doling out punishments galore these past several months. The company’s latest catastrophe, a bastardization of Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms, has all the charm of a day spent…
There’s an unusual and relatively new trend in theater that finds actors performing monologues written by and specifically for other performers. The latest evidence of this trend is Actors Theatre’s production of Gray’s Anatomy, one of Spalding Gray’s better-known monologues now being read by Phoenix actor Jon Gentry at the…
The Producers is more than theater. It is, like a handful of other shows, an event. Mel Brooks’ record-breaking Tony-winner is one of those programs attended by people who never set foot inside a theater unless it’s to witness a road company of a show that’s received so much press…
I don’t find married couples particularly amusing, but I do enjoy watching Bob Sorenson and Debby Rosenthal perform. Good thing, too, because these two local institutions are the only reason to sit through I Do! I Do!, the passé paean to matrimony with which Phoenix Theatre is currently torturing unsuspecting…
I deplore The Fantasticks. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s hyper-popular, record-breaking chamber musical is on my short list of shows I wish had never been written — just below Cats and a few notches up from anything adapted from a Disney cartoon. I’ve endured this show numerous times over the…
As Black Theatre Troupe deserts its longtime home, the dilapidated downtown Helen K. Mason Center, for the polished Herberger Stage West, the 33-year-old company has found a marketing niche. Dinah Was, Oliver Goldstick’s biography of blues singer Dinah Washington, is the latest in a string of tune-filled profiles of ill-fated…
Fonsia Dorsey and Weller Martin are old. They have, like so many elderly people, been abandoned to the American health-care system and have landed in an old folks’ home where they meet one Sunday afternoon. He’s a crotchety codger, she’s a peevish fuddy-duddy, and, for two hours plus intermission, they…
With Blue, playwright Charles Randolph-Wright set out to tell a story about African-Americans that isn’t about race relations; a black family drama that’s not about oppression but about good old American dysfunction. Randolph-Wright succeeded — not wisely, but too well. Blue is a ceaselessly pleasant shaggy dog story dotted with…
Equus was first produced in the early ’70s and quickly became a modern classic. Peter Shaffer’s morality play just as quickly became passé, its postmodern approach to religiosity and sex nullified by the go-go ’80s, when money was power and religion was usurped by “spirituality.” Which isn’t to say that…
Deep in the dark, scary heart of downtown’s warehouse district, the fledgling Stray Cat Theatre has scored another success. With The Dianalogues, this inventive young company kicks off its second season in a drafty hangar that’s well off the beaten path but well worth finding. Laurel Haines’ collection of comic…
There was a hearse in the parking lot on opening night of Desert Foothills Theater’s Simply Sammy, perhaps waiting to cart off audience members who died of disappointment. The tip-off that this tribute to the late Sammy Davis Jr. was going to be a dog came with the first strains…
My favorite characters in Neil Simon’s Rumors are Charlie and Myra, because they never once take the stage. They are only ever talked about, never seen — a condition that might improve this tired farce if it were to exist in every corner. Phoenix Theatre last week joined the parade…
From the stage of Phoenix College’s John Paul Theatre, the Black Theatre Troupe has scored another triumph. The Trial of One Short-Sighted Black Woman vs. Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae is a smartly executed, vividly written political satire full of sharp performances. It’s a morality play that’s never preachy; a…
Bell, Book and Candle is a fusty perennial of high school drama clubs and community playhouses, a ’50s parlor comedy that’s not particularly funny. Theater Works, for unfathomable reasons, has mounted a production of this programmer that’s every bit as phony as the stuffed cat the lead actress drags around…
I’ve begun to wonder how it would be to see a mediocre production of Angels in America. Somehow, I’ve only seen resplendent, near-perfect stagings of this new American classic, most recently Actors Theatre’s current production of both halves of the eight-hour play. Angels in America, for the uninitiated, is two…
In a dark bar, two men are conversing. One of them, a politician, is telling the other, his campaign manager, about a recent rendezvous with a third man, a sexy but unscrupulous fellow with whom the politician is smitten. Suddenly, the politician says to his companion, “Let me show you…
No theatergoer should be made to stare at an ugly set for three hours. If one must, however, one should do so at Phoenix Theatre’s new production of Into the Woods. Its dreary gray forest, designed by usually dependable scenic designer Gregory Jaye, is hung limply with unsightly rope and…
The Fantasticks is not. What begins as a promising rerun quickly becomes — somewhere after its third or fourth musical number — just another small-time production of a big-deal show. Pleasant performances and familiar tunes aren’t enough to elevate this tuneful repeat, and so Stagebrush Theatre’s season opener winds up…
I hesitate to expect too much from any theater season, but the upcoming calendar of plays and musicals certainly looks more interesting than the last several have. This season, old Will is hotter than ever, and there are more musical tributes than you can shake a baton at. If there…
