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,…
Lieutenant Commander Orlando is the kind of guy who deserves to be shot in the back. He tortures political prisoners by day, and just when his wife decides to take a trip, he inconveniences her by borrowing the strap from her suitcase to tie up his sex slave. Maria Irene…
Lieutenant Commander Orlando is the kind of guy who deserves to be shot in the back. He tortures political prisoners by day, and just when his wife decides to take a trip, he inconveniences her by borrowing the strap from her suitcase to tie up his sex slave. Maria Irene…
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,…
Lieutenant Commander Orlando is the kind of guy who deserves to be shot in the back. He tortures political prisoners by day, and just when his wife decides to take a trip, he inconveniences her by borrowing the strap from her suitcase to tie up his sex slave. Maria Irene…
Lieutenant Commander Orlando is the kind of guy who deserves to be shot in the back. He tortures political prisoners by day, and just when his wife decides to take a trip, he inconveniences her by borrowing the strap from her suitcase to tie up his sex slave. Maria Irene…
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,…
Lampooning the shysters of evangelism has kept satirists busy ever since the faithful realized that the price of salvation was an empty pocket. What’s even more hilarious, the faithful never quite seem to grasp what’s going on. So I expected Lloyd’s Prayer to be funnier than it was. But playwright…
Lampooning the shysters of evangelism has kept satirists busy ever since the faithful realized that the price of salvation was an empty pocket. What’s even more hilarious, the faithful never quite seem to grasp what’s going on. So I expected Lloyd’s Prayer to be funnier than it was. But playwright…
According to the Arizona Shakespeare Festival’s production of Romeo and Juliet, Verona was full of crazy people who screamed a lot, mugged outrageously, told jokes and fell on the ground. Of course the title couple lived there as well, and they tried to go about their forbidden love affair, in…
Death and the Maiden turns out to be a lot like a political candidate: lots of promises, and always the hope of answers to it all. But South American playwright Ariel Dorfman sidetracks us with credibility problems–always a bad sign when it comes to politics–and ends up so muddling what…
