The theatre as an art form seems to be receding from relevance to our lives. With the exception of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America, plays about contemporary problems have yielded to film as the art form of preference in our contemporary culture. But theatre in America, which has been…
Presumed by many to be Shakespeare’s first play, The Comedy of Errors is a terrible comedy. Based on an ancient Roman farce written by Plautus 1,800 years or so before Shakespeare, the plot is so mechanical and the exposition so cumbersome, it is amazing a writer of any skill would…
An injudicious case of grand larceny is taking place at Dial Corporate Center’s Playhouse on the Park in downtown Phoenix. It might be termed “Crimes of the Art.” The occasion is Phoenix Theatre’s production of Beth Henley’s 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Crimes of the Heart, and it blatantly steals from…
Stacking the Decadent The Academy Award-winning movie Cabaret is available at your local video store (even supermarket), with career-defining performances by Joel Grey, Liza Minnelli and Michael York. So why not snuggle up with some microwave popcorn and give it a replay? Why would you want to drive all the…
If overheated histrionics is your bag, Dingo Troupe’s production of A Prayer for My Daughter delivers a fix to satisfy the most insatiable melodrama junkie. The first play by Thomas Babe, a protege of the late Public Theater impresario Joseph Papp, this potboiler premiered in the mid-Seventies, so it is…
Mutilated human corpses pile up in Port-au-Prince, severed body parts strew the roads of Rwanda, blood flows in Bosnia to cleanse Yugoslavia of ethnic impurity. Even on the eve of an invasion, ruthless dictators cling to power in the name of the people, ignoring the will of the electorate. And…
The Phantom of the Opera is not just a musical. It is an industry. Written by the richest man in the theatre, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and produced by the second-richest man in the theatre, Cameron Mackintosh, Phantom has been marketed to Phoenix as the biggest thing ever to hit the…
In the preface to a collection of his plays, author Christopher Durang fondly recalls the famous I Love Lucy episode in which Little Ricky is born. This show prompted Durang to pattern his first play, written in the second grade, after the story. Since this work isn’t publicly available, it’s…
A play about Antarctica seems like a good antidote for the summer heat in Phoenix. But Terra Nova, the story of the 1911 race for the South Pole, trades one hell for another. Playwright Ted Tally uses the death of one of Britain’s most cherished heroes, the explorer Robert Falcon…
After seeing the latest version of Forbidden Broadway, I left Herberger Theater Center depressed. My reaction was like the one I had when a shock jock started telling jokes about the homeless. His routine was clever, all right, but wasn’t the subject too sad to be funny? Forbidden Broadway 1994,…
In Lips Together, Teeth Apart, Terrence McNally’s 1991 play staged by Arizona Theatre Company, we’re treated to the spectacle of a weekend with two upscale couples at an expensive Fire Island beach house sipping their bloody marys out on the deck while hating themselves and each other. This is not…
Some musicals beg you to like them. They brandish their sincerity as a weapon–you’re hit over the head, grabbed by the throat and throttled. If you try to resist, well, you’re the kind of dour-hearted drudge who ought to stick to Eugene O’Neill revivals. But even those who have really…
Everyone in the audience was laughing like crazy. I saw a man on the aisle wipe away tears. The laughter was the from-the-gut kind, and it was for a song called “A Secretary Is Not a Toy.” I laughed as hard as anybody, because the experience had the same effect…
All through Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, I kept wondering if the characters were ever going to stop whining. But these were whining kinds of people. They would whine about anything–the weather, childhood, tourists and every person in the past who could conceivably be blamed for their current state…
After having made the pilgrimage eastward to the Sullivan Street Playhouse a couple of times during the last few decades to see The Fantasticks, I was curious to know what the experience would be like plucked from the context of Nathan’s hot dogs, screaming Village activists and one more subway…
The Robber Bridegroom works hard at telling everyone they’re having a good time. The characters are all eccentrics, the pratfalls continuous, the musical numbers relentless. But all this in-your-face cheeriness can’t really help a show like The Robber Bridegroom, presented by ASU’s Department of Theatre and Lyric Opera Theatre. It…
When Of Thee I Sing was first staged in 1931 at the height of the Depression, it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its gang of pompous, Senator Packwood-style legislators who wave cigars and ogle the young ladies as overtly as they can. Plus a change . . . Watching…
The title of Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot refers to the unbreakable bond between two brothers. But in Fugard’s two-character, one-set play, the brothers–one apparently black, the other apparently white, but both classified “colored” under the apartheid law–are separated by racial hatred. And so, by implication, is Fugard’s South Africa. Staged…
It’s moan and groan time at the Herberger again. We’ve got yet another message/relationship play, this time called Sight Unseen. Written by Donald Margulies and staged by the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company, it treats us to two hours of four dysfunctional characters explaining how they feel about each other. It’s…
Rope, presented by Banzai Entertainment at Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre, is a murder mystery but not a whodunit–the play begins with the two murderers strangling their victim, hiding his body, then serving their guests a buffet from the trunk into which the corpse has been stuffed. The story examines why…
The Good Times Are Killing Me was a surprise off-Broadway hit a few years back, and the autobiographical play by syndicated cartoonist Lynda Barry–first a novel–tries to capture the mid-1960s Great Society frame of mind, when blacks were moving into aging, middle-class, white neighborhoods. Barry’s voice is that of Edna,…
The Good Times Are Killing Me was a surprise off-Broadway hit a few years back, and the autobiographical play by syndicated cartoonist Lynda Barry–first a novel–tries to capture the mid-1960s Great Society frame of mind, when blacks were moving into aging, middle-class, white neighborhoods. Barry’s voice is that of Edna,…
