Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is exactly the kind of entertainment I deplore: a corporate-inspired translation of a cutie-pie musical cartoon adapted from classic literature. It’s peopled by actors dressed in character costumes that all but swallow their performances, which are anyway built on attempts to ape the motion picture…
We’re a town lousy with theater awards: the ariZonis, the Scotties, the Milties and the Tilties. Chris Page at the Tribune has his Spotlight Awards, and even Mark Turvin hands out something called The Fishy Awards, which sounds sort of — well, you can finish that thought yourself, can’t you?…
I won’t add my voice to the cacophony of complaints about the gratuitous nudity forever on display at Nearly Naked Theatre, in part because I don’t care, but also because it’s bad form to bitch that the players are undraped when we’ve been warned ahead of time. The name of…
High on the list of life’s great mysteries, way up near “Why do we wait until a pig is dead to cure it?” and “Why do women sometimes shave off their eyebrows and then draw them back on?” is this one: “Why does dinner theater always suck so bad?” On…
Last Wednesday night, while the rest of America was watching Bo and Carrie duke it out in the final hour of American Idol, I was watching a room full of singers on a different stage. And thinking that maybe I’ve been watching too much television lately, because Phoenix Theatre’s production…
Two women kiss on a deserted Manhattan street, and the consequences of that kiss change their lives forever. Diana Son’s Stop Kiss burnishes a brief moment in the lives of ordinary people, making it memorable with smart dialogue and familiar personalities. And Stray Cat Theatre once again rises to the…
It happened again the other day. I was asked what I do for a living and, when I confessed that I’m a theater critic, I got the same response I’ve been getting for years. “Is there enough theater in Phoenix for you to cover?” That’s the polite version. I’ve also…
Gifted playwright alert: Donald Margulies is in town, or at least one of his better plays is, in time to help wind up what’s turned out to be a mediocre season and to remind us of what we’d have lost if the troubled Actors Theatre had succumbed to its recent…
I love hate mail. Next to the envelope that arrives at my home each week filled with what screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz once called “the most restful shade of green,” getting hate mail is the best part of my job. I’m nuts for letters written by angry actors whose work I’ve…
It’s the bane of my existence, a hideous blight to which I’ve been witness countless times, a painful bore that causes me to shrink in my theater seat each time it waggles its ugly theatrical head. Audience participation gives me gas. It ruins any play, lovely or ugly, and destroys…
I knew it was going to be a long night when Koko! The Island Adventures of Miss Koko Neufchatel began with the show’s lone actor dragging a couple of audience members onto the stage to wish them happy birthday. Note to local directors: Theater is not Chuck E. Cheese’s, and…
I hate Shakespeare. I always have. And you — if you’re unfortunate enough to have slogged through one of his interminable plays (or worse, a film adaptation of same) — probably hate him, too. That is, unless you’re a snooty dilettante who’s allowed himself to be convinced that every couplet…
Childsplay’s Romeo and Juliet is not just for kids. Thanks to crafty staging and a talented cast, all of them able to play persuasively any age or gender, it’s an edifying and even entertaining production of this oft-told love story. At a Sunday matinee populated mostly by underdressed tweens, I…
Whenever I find myself trapped in a theater with another lousy production of another dreary play or musical, I always turn to my friend the playbill. I’ve destroyed my eyesight peering into the dark at these marvels of bad syntax and questionable grammar, but it’s been worth it. Because playbills…
Molly Sweeney is blind. And she’s married to a windbag, a dorky bore who’s convinced her to undergo surgery to restore her eyesight. She’s lived a full, happy life in her native Ireland — at least until her meddlesome husband takes her on as his latest cause. The operation restores…
Imagine for a moment that you’re at a diner, and you’ve just ordered one of those “man-size” breakfast combos, the kind that come with four eggs and three kinds of meat and griddle cakes and a side of hash browns and a little plate of toast. In the space of…
The Last Five Years, which played briefly off-Broadway in 2002, chronicles a young couple’s romance using two different time lines. Her story starts at the end of their relationship, while his begins at the beginning, on the day they meet. The two stories collide briefly at the couple’s wedding, then…
Alas, the lowly AIDS play. Originally built in the face of a crisis, AIDS plays have lingered as a subgenre of theater, one that has withered as science and society have found ways to address the crisis. There are notable exceptions: Angels in America, of course; and Larry Kramer’s The…
If Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart isn’t often revived, it’s almost certainly because it’s an issue-related drama with a story — about the first few years of the AIDS epidemic in Manhattan — that sounds, in quick summary, quite dated. It doesn’t help that the play is equal parts lecture…
There was a time when Disney knew its place. That time has long since passed. Once content to deliver clever cartoons and the occasional film comedy starring Kurt Russell, Disney has begun reading its own press clippings and, puffed up about being “The Happiest Place on Earth!”, wants to rub…
We’ve lost another one. Last month, the folks at TheatreScape announced that they’re pulling the plug on the rest of their season and on the troupe itself. Small companies like TheatreScape come and go all the time, but the ones that put together shows as worthy as this company’s often…
Actors Theatre has struck pay dirt with Nickel and Dimed, playwright Joan Holden’s comic adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s nonfiction best seller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which noted author and activist Ehrenreich went undercover as a minimum-wage earner to write about how the working poor…
