June 1969 Tommy, a double-album rock opera by The Who, is released. At first banned by the BBC and certain U.S. radio stations (probably because of the child abuse that features so prominently in its story), it eventually reaches #4 on the U.S. Billboard album charts and #2 in the…
Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: These adapted adventures feature music and lyrics by Roger Miller and a book by William Hauptman, but retain Mark Twain’s deeply moral depictions of the 19th-century social tapestry. Twain scholars probably don’t head for dinner theaters often, but those who do in this…
First, the accolades: Arizona Theatre Company’s production of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie is nearly perfect. Its actors turn in superb performances; its stage design is magnificent; its director, Samantha K. Wyer, brings subtleties to its simple, sad, two-character story. Which all leads to Morrie’s working so beautifully on the…
Trainspotting: The heck with rehab. Anyone wanting to kick narcotics addiction should just go see this gloriously ugly production of Harry Gibson’s meditation on addiction’s dark night. The play, based on the Irvine Welsh novel and best known from director Danny Boyle’s popular 1996 film adaptation, is really just a…
The heck with rehab. Anyone wanting to kick narcotics addiction should just go see Stray Cat Theatre’s gloriously ugly production of Harry Gibson’s Trainspotting. Crammed to capacity with pitch-perfect performances and almost unbearably realistic scenes of degradation, this stroll through addiction’s dark night is enough to scare anyone off junk…
It was a book and a play before it was a film, but, as ever, folks will still want Trainspotting, the play, to mirror the movie. It doesn’t. Here’s how. Character: Spud, the beloved spaz Fate in book and movie: Goofy speed fanatic who hates working. Fate in play: Nonexistence…
Woodsman: Is What It Is Theatre all but vanished last year, but resurfaces this month with an original adaptation (and world première) of the 2004 film that starred Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. The story follows Walter, who’s just been released from a 12-year prison sentence for committing a horrible…
Despite what you may have heard, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is not a play about bestiality. The subject hovers over the story, but goat-fucking is more an allegory than a theme. Playwright Edward Albee is concerned here with the boundaries for “decent” human behavior; about how we decide…
Epic Proportions: This comedy by playwrights Larry Coen and David Crane came about after the pair noticed an extra in a biblical epic they were watching on television being crushed by a falling column. Coen and Crane (who’s best known as co-creator and executive producer of TV’s Friends) began to…
I suppose I arrived at Phoenix Theatre last weekend with expectations too high. But considering the talented cast that director D. Scott Withers — no slouch himself — assembled for the company’s update of Clare Boothe Luce’s famously funny The Women, I couldn’t have guessed at the mess I’d find…
My friend Neil e-mailed me the other day. “I can’t take another day of this,” he wrote. “If I hear about one more ‘Junior’ production being staged in Phoenix, I’m going to throw myself under the wheels of a bus.” Like me, Neil is a theater critic who’s troubled by…
Epic Proportions: This comedy by playwrights Larry Coen and David Crane came about after the pair noticed an extra in a biblical epic they were watching on television being crushed by a falling column. Coen and Crane (who’s best known as co-creator and executive producer of TV’s Friends) began to…
There might be something that David Ira Goldstein loves more than theater: Perhaps his wife; possibly his cats; maybe a good game of golf. But you’d never know it watching Arizona Theatre Company’s world première of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure, which ATC artistic director Goldstein has helmed. This sublime…
Jesus Christ Superstar: Who in the world does He think He is? He’ll tell you — in song! — if you’ll get yourself down to Desert Stages Theatre. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famed musical is here again, resurrected just in time for Easter. And Passover! Lloyd Webber’s tuneful…
It’s a humid summer day in 1976, and my sister and her kids and I are going someplace in her big blue Plymouth. I’m up front with Sis; the kids are in the back, and all three of them are singing something called “The Very Strange Medley” at the tops…
Broadway Palm Dinner Theater: Part of the Prather Family of dinner theaters, this local branch is now in its fifth season. The chain tends to share shows, which means we get to see out-of-towners hoofing the stage. Typical surf-and-turf menu. Current show: Funny Girl, through April 16. 5247 East Brown…
Natives: Arizona Jewish Theatre Company artistic director Janet Arnold stars in Janet Neipris’s contemporary comedy as Viola, a middle-aged divorcée trying to get on with her life after her three grown daughters are gone. When they come for a visit, it’s just in time to interrupt Viola’s romantic summer trip…
Deathtrap: Theater Works is trotting out this frankly done-to-death perennial, one that’s better remembered for the excellent film version starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve. Regardless of who’s playing it (and this production features mostly local unknowns), Deathtrap really only works if you don’t know the windup huzzah. Which is…
Michael Frayn’s better plays tend to be overshadowed by his best-known work: the superlative backstage farce Noises Off, or any of his several clever novels (most notably Headlong, a Booker Prize contender). Frayn’s Benefactors, which won the Olivier Award in 1984 and was later revived in London, is one of…
Nicolas Glaser was one among a handful of A-list stage actors who called Phoenix home in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like most of the rest of them, Glaser lit out for the Great White Way, where he’s made a success playing good guys, gangsters, and everything in between…
Okay, so you never miss an episode of The Golden Girls. It’s telecast pretty much constantly — the Lifetime network airs about a dozen episodes of the popular ’80s sitcom every day — and you never miss the show about four grumpy old bags who sit around their Florida condo…
Kimberly Akimbo: David Lindsay Abaire’s cautionary tale about a teenager with a rare condition that causes her body to age faster than it should was a runaway smash when it debuted in Manhattan a few years ago. The author of Wonder of the World, an early hit for Stray Cat…
