I like music. I like theater. I’ve found that I even like musical theater at least some of the time. But the “revue” genre of theater is a kind of torture, as far as I’m concerned. I’d love to spend an evening listening to an excellent vocalist working through just…
First, a quick happy note: Childsplay has received donations of vehicle repair, maintenance, and a promotional color van wrap from Purcell Tire, FastSigns, and the reality show NASCAR Angels. This fabulous collection of valuable services will greatly benefit the award-winning professional children’s theater (which tours like a mofo so that…
Even if the largely teenage cast of bare: A Musical hadn’t succeeded in really selling this rather stunning story of naughty Catholic school kids, it would have appeared that they had. That’s because the audience for Aperio Productions’ loud, rowdy show screamed with joy after every number, as if they…
So much bouncing. So much squealing. I love to watch young audiences. They’re better than the show — but that’s true even when the show is really good, like the productions of Great Arizona Puppets. And everybody quiets down and sits still when the lights change and Tinker Bell opens…
Man, if I had to choose between: a. making a living in the arts by presenting plotless musical revues and exploitive, offensive, witless bedroom farces andb. not making a living in the arts at all, I’d probably sit up a lot with insomnia. To be fair, audiences who love this stuff skeeve me out way…
Terry Helland, director of Desert Stages Theatre’s Jekyll and Hyde, took the stage just before curtain. “This show is the most difficult I’ve ever worked on,” he announced cheerfully. “But I think I got a handle on it.” That didn’t seem likely, somehow. Directors typically produce crap and think it’s…
I get it when theaters want to make sure we know that something like Rent or Les Mis has been cleaned up and squooshed down for young performers and young audiences, but I don’t think anyone had to stick the word “KIDS” on the title of a stage musical based…
You are seated, for the sixth consecutive year, in an imaginary auditorium, where the sound of rustling programs and impatiently shuffling feet suggest that the doling out of the Robbie Awards is about to commence. A hush falls over the pretend crowd, made up entirely of people who sell insurance…
Martha J. Clarke and the costume shop of Arizona Broadway Theatre have done it again. From the cowboy-print pajamas on little brother Randolph to the huge, crinolined confections on the wives and mothers, ABT’s Bye Bye Birdie is a vinyl overnight bag crammed with the ginchiest Barbie and Ken outfits…
You may not realize it, but we have a Hale Centre Theatre in the Valley because a nice young couple, Ruth and Nathan Hale, moved from Salt Lake City to the L.A. area in 1943 and discovered they could get more acting work if they opened their own theater. The…
Stephen Sondheim is not America’s most hummable, road-trip-sing-alongy composer (unless you run with a really esoteric crowd). He’s known for polyphony, occasional purposeful dissonance, and using meter and rhythm to reinforce subject matter and plot developments — sometimes even writing songs that sound like a pointillist painting (Sunday in the…
Broadway Palm Dinner Theater’s production of High School Musical was nice enough. My impression of the show was certainly helped by the fact that I, unlike most people my age, don’t have kids between the ages of four months and 14 years, so I’m not sick to death of “Get’cha Head…
For every person who claims that Tempe’s Gammage Auditorium is a marvel of acoustic excellence, you can probably find one who’s been subjected to plays that sound like talking mud. Apparently, it has to do with where you’re sitting and what kind of performance it is — whether it’s instrumental…
By the end of the summer, a lot of parents will probably be thinking, “The last thing my kid needs is more creativity and self-esteem.” But you know that’s just the vacation desperation kicking in; really, we all need to be dragged away from our glowing screens, and Childsplay’s little summer revival of last season’s…
It seems Nearly Naked Theatre has been doing “naughty” plays for so long now that the company can appear subversive only by presenting a traditional musical. But the 10-year-old troupe isn’t pulling a stunt with its production of Blood Brothers, Willy Russell’s celebrated smash hit about twins separated at birth…
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, the first musical based on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, is a warm-hearted, straightforward appreciation of the joys and challenges of being a regular little kid. Little kids in the audience tend to enjoy the scenes about lunchtime, Valentine’s Day, romantic crushes, struggles with…
I can’t keep saying I don’t like musicals when it turns out I enjoy myself at so many of them, so I guess I’ve processed whatever early trauma was getting in the way. Though I run into a clinker every now and then, our Valley has a lot of talented, fun, creative…
I’ve been working on a list of people or things that Katie McFadzen possibly can’t play. Here’s what I have so far: a pencil sharpener; Stalin; a venereal disease. But don’t quote me on any of these, because it’s likely that next month she’ll show up on a local stage…
Oh, these crazy contemporary English playwrights, always messing with us one way or another and making us feel like wet-behind-the-ears Colonial idiots. Prime example Howard Barker, who created a movement called Theater of Catastrophe, plunks his nasty, alienating scenarios into historical settings the U.S. public schools tend not to touch on (so for…
Shannon Whirry and Steven J. Scally play people with problems in Bug. I could see from the promo photos that iTheatre Collaborative’s production of Bug re-uses Christopher Haines’ evocative cheap-motel box set from Eat the Taste earlier this season, which is great by me. I can think of several other plays that would also look…
I like to think that Johnny Cash, the country music singer-songwriter and American institution, mellowed with age. I suspect that late in life, he’d left far behind him the hard-edged life of a bitter former yokel who cheated on his wife and became addicted to “every drug there was to…
Kansas City-based Theater League presents in just seven U.S. cities, so it’s always felt kind of like Phoenix’s own little Shubert Organization. Although TL does produce shows itself, its Passport to Broadway series snags national road companies of hot musicals from the tour producers (for example, the sparkling Mamma Mia!…
