No one would be served by the suggestion that Mesa Little Theatre’s The Pinchpenny Phantom of the Opera is a sterling production, or even that there could be a sterling production of this sophomoric spoof by Dave Reiser and Jack Sharkey. That wonderful title suggests that we may get to…
Early in the beautifully written first act of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, one of the characters says to another, “I remember everything!” To which the other replies, “That must be a burden.” Albee, at 68, knows that memory can be a wily, artful thing, and freeing oneself of one’s…
I didn’t much like The Cocktail Hour, which surprised me. Not only because it’s one of the more amusing and sophisticated of A.R. Gurney’s comedies, but because the company presenting the play–and the director who staged it–normally offers more muscular fare. This time out, director Betty St. George and her…
With its current production, Arizona Jewish Theatre Company has managed to cram both comedy and tragedy onto the same stage. The comedy is Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig. The tragedy is that this nearly three-hour-long play is enormously unfunny. Wasserstein’s relentless comedy concerns a trio of sisters who gather to…
Patient A is a small, infrequently produced play about the life and death of Kimberly Bergalis. Bergalis died in 1991 from complications of AIDS, which she presumably contracted from her dentist. Her case became national news and Bergalis a media figure and penultimate “innocent victim.” In this solemn one-act–presented by…
Phoenix Theatre’s current production, Dial M for Murder, pits a killer against a mystery writer/police inspector team, but the plot is no puzzler. My mystery-writer friend and seatmate Karol had the whole plot figured out in the first act when the leading lady (Heidi Ewart) sat down to work on…
August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is among the most stirring dramas written this century. The critically acclaimed play, about a black American family’s struggle to come to terms with its legacy of slavery, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1990. It is Wilson’s intention to write a play…
I’ve been a big fan of Paul Rudnick’s writing ever since I read his first novel, Social Disease, in the early Eighties. That book, and most of Rudnick’s subsequent work (the play I Hate Hamlet; several screenplays, including the two Addams Family movies; and his hilarious monthly movie column in…
I hate mimes. Who doesn’t? Say “mime” and I think of Marcel Marceau. Or worse, Shields and Yarnell. No matter who, it’ll be white face and a striped tee shirt and those loose-limbed bits with titles like “Climbing the Stairs” or “Walking Against the Wind.” Right? Not anymore according to…
Phoenix is lousy with Shakespeare this week. At Herberger Theater Center, Arizona Theatre Company’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona trods the boards. Macbeth is snorting and pawing the ground at Arizona State University’s Paul V. Galvin Playhouse. And over at Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre, both Hamlet and Macbeth–by way of…
Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris is a musical revue that became an off-Broadway staple nearly 30 years ago. Truth be told, Jacques Brel is quite dead. If he weren’t, Todd James Smeltzer Productions’ current version of this tired homage to the late Belgian lyricist might…
All in the Timing, a collection of six short one-acts now being staged by Actors Theatre of Phoenix, exploded off-Broadway a couple of seasons ago. It snagged a spot on Time magazine’s 1995 “Ten Best” list and made an overnight star of its author, David Ives. Critics heaped praise on…
It’s becoming more difficult to crow about live theatre in Phoenix. For a couple of years, it looked like the local theatre scene was evolving away from the sort of mask-and-wig clubs that trotted out another production of Blithe Spirit every season. Small, daring new troupes were unfolding every couple…
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not the most amusing of William Shakespeare’s comedies. It’s clumsily constructed and makes an awkward shift into melodrama toward the end of the first act. All that makes Arizona Theatre Company’s colossal production of the 16th-century satire all the more impressive. Frankly, I’ve had…
It’s no mystery why Lionel Bart’s Oliver! is occasionally trotted out for another go-around. This classic British musical, adapted from Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel Oliver Twist, features some wonderfully bent characters and a magnificent score. The real puzzle is why Southwest Shakespeare Company is producing this show, which has no…
There are better reasons to strap on a bustle than Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Something, perhaps the popularity of the film versions, has convinced theatre producers that people want to see this play. But while both the 1988 movie based on Hampton’s dramatization and 1989’s Valmont were small masterpieces…
Nowadays, send-ups of old movie musicals tend to play about as well as the films they spoof. There are enough such satires that they’ve become a subgenre themselves; we’ve seen so many stage, film and television takeoffs on Busby Berkeley, et al., that the lines between the parodies and their…
Immediately before the opening-night performance of Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, downtown was appropriately drenched by one of Phoenix’s surprise monsoon thunderstorms. Through much of the first act, audience members dried out in Planet Earth’s stuffy, hangarlike theatre space, while the usual suspects romped through a…
Opening night of Guv: The Emperor Strikes Back, the New Scottsdale Playhouse was half empty when the curtain rose on this much-anticipated sequel to 1990’s Guv: The Musical. Perhaps all the local Democrats had headed for Sun City to witness President Clinton’s campaign stop there. It’s just as well. Watching…
About two thirds of the way into Christopher Durang’s 1987 comedy Laughing Wild, the Infant of Prague appears. He comes not as a miraculous apparition or an ornate symbol of retribution, but as a guest on a daytime talk show. While He is grilled by a woman who may or…
If you love to be enraged by art like Phoenix Art Museum’s recent exhibit about the American flag or the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, you really should head over to Mercury Theater in Mesa to catch the granddaddy of all in-your-face concupiscence, Aristophanes’ ribald comedy Lysistrata. In this play, the…
The classic French bedroom farce was invented almost a hundred years ago by Georges Feydeau. The form features a complicated plot that unfolds at breakneck speed, punctuated with quick exits through slamming doors. The subject is invariably sex or, more precisely, infidelity. Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, recently seen at Theater…
