Opening-night performances by small theater companies usually play to half-empty houses — except, apparently, for shows with the phrase “sexual perversity” in their titles. Sexual Perversity in Chicago’s first night was a sellout for Nearly Naked Theatre Company, a fact that so pleased the show’s director that he photographed his…
To say that no actor creates a perfect Hamlet is no more than saying that no person leads a perfect life. It’s the richest part in English-language drama, maybe in Western drama, and every actor lucky enough to get a crack at it can hope only to grab an aspect…
My faithful theater companion and I normally agree about the quality of the shows we see every weekend. When we don’t, it’s he who is more generous and forgiving about a program’s shortcomings. Last weekend, during the long ride home from faraway Theater Works, we bandied words about the company’s…
The new musical revue at Phoenix Theatre epitomizes everything I loathe about the genre: It’s formulaic and predictable, full of half-written songs whose tunes I’d forgotten by the time I hit the parking lot. Why, then, did I so enjoy I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change?Almost certainly because this…
The Herberger’s center stage this week is splattered with paint and piled high with blank canvases. This carefully arranged mess (which bursts frequently into colorful life, thanks to Rick Paulsen’s extravagant lighting) is where Steven Dietz’s Inventing Van Gogh — the author’s fourth play to be commissioned by Arizona Theatre…
Michelle Gardner arrives bearing Danish. She shows up for what she calls her “farewell interview” clutching a four-foot-long cheese-and-blueberry concoction from Karsh’s, the kosher bakery her parents have owned for decades. She’s come to talk about Blown Sideways Through Life, the new one-woman show she’s starring in, as well as…
Bleacher Bums is a baseball comedy which, from its earliest moments, had me root root rooting for the curtain to fall. The kind folks at Ensemble Theater have set up a kiosk in the lobby so that one can, as the song goes, buy you some peanuts and Cracker Jack…
Luigi Pirandello’s Enrico IV is enjoying a revival. There’s a production running now at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, translated by Richard Nelson and directed by the company’s artistic director, and an independent film company is shooting an adaptation of the story for the BBC. I wonder if either is…
“It’s hard for men to date me,” admits Tori King. “I just can’t let go and trust someone. Which, in turn, is hard on me, because I have a huge libido.”King also has a huge success — with The More Men Weigh, the one-woman show that depicts the breakup of…
Rose Robinson is tired. She’s tired of white men calling all the shots; tired of dreaming about one day being a famous singer, like Billie Holiday; and sick of working in seedy nightclubs. She sings in Sam’s Jazz Club on weekends, and at any other sleazy bar with a bandstand…
When German expressionist choreographer Susanne Linke visited Senegal in 1998, her collaboration with the men of Compagnie Jant-Bi produced Le Coq est Mort (The Cock Is Dead). And this Euro-African dance theater production, coming to Gammage Auditorium on Wednesday, April 11, is a 70-minute tour de force worth crowing about.The…
Arizona Opera’s last offering, Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment, was slim and frothy to the point of forgettability. No one is likely to have the same complaints about the season finale, Don Carlo, whatever else may be said about it. This work by Giuseppe Verdi — or, as generations…
After seeing her performance in In Mixed Company’s Pterodactyls, I have scratched Barbara McGrath from my list of Actors I’d Rather Not See On Stage Ever Again. McGrath’s star turn in Nicky Silver’s dark comedy has wiped away my memory of her last several attempts at acting, which I found…
Ever since Arizona Theatre Company announced early last year that it had optioned Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves, I’ve been wondering: Why? This threadbare marriage comedy is usually seen, on those occasions when it’s trotted out, at tiny community houses, where audiences are more tolerant of pale pleasantries…
Very occasionally, one of our local companies produces a perfect evening of theater. The first indication that Actors Theatre of Phoenix had weighed in with a contender came when the curtain rose on Jeff Thomson’s breathtaking set design for The Archbishop’s Ceiling. The first-night audience burst into excited applause and…
If the measure of a good play is its ability to evoke emotion, then Love Waits is a stunning success. The play’s teeny opening-night audience (I was joined by five patrons and an AriZoni adjudicator, one of those poor souls charged with judging plays for a dubious local theater awards…
Forget that I’m an atheist. Or that the last time I heard a disco song I liked was nearly a quarter-century ago. My objections to God’s Trombones are strictly critical. In its new production of this terribly contemporary musical, Black Theatre Troupe delivers a loud but largely ill-conceived collection of…
Having given us opera’s all-time greatest bad girl earlier this season with Carmen, Arizona Opera has been taking pains to compensate, with two heroines in a row so goody-goody that Jeanette MacDonald might find them square. First there was Minnie, The Girl of the Golden West, holding Bible study for…
Two nude dancers pace ritualistically toward an offstage light, their bodies breathtakingly painted by tattoo artist George Long. It takes hours to perfect these full-body tattoos before each performance, and you can only imagine the loving care Long must give to each curlicue that encircles the cheeks of the dancers’…
In Ira Levin’s stage mystery Deathtrap, a playwright glumly declares a rival’s play so good that a talented director couldn’t hurt it. That’s how good the best works of Gilbert and Sullivan are. Take, for instance, The Gondoliers, or The King of Barataria. Not, perhaps, on the level of The…
Those of us foolish enough to have left our handkerchiefs at home exited last week’s matinee of Wit wet-faced and weary. Arizona Theatre Company’s production of this extraordinary play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1999, is an emotionally exhausting hour and a half.Both entertaining and intellectually challenging,…
I’ve been dodging invitations to see the Oxymoron’Z improvisational troupe for nearly a decade. The materials, faxed or sometimes mailed to me by the group’s founder and guru, Louis Anthony Russo, promised “great big laughs” and “spontaneous fun.” It sounded to me like quite the opposite, and year after year…
