November 17: It must be Christmastime — I’m averaging three calls a day from publicists trying to persuade me to review their upcoming holiday shows. The woman from the Rockettes’ Radio City Christmas Spectacular called twice today. She didn’t laugh when I asked what’s Christmassy about a bunch of girls…
While the inanities of the Phoenix Festival of Lights schlepped noisily past last Saturday night, Nearly Naked Theatre wowed an almost full house with yet another fine piece of complex, compelling theater. This tireless troupe’s take on Joe Calarco’s smart, sexy Shakespeare’s R & J drowned out the idiotic honking…
Normally I cower under furniture when a Neil Simon play takes any local stage, but I’d heard that Shawna Quain was doing a bang-up job in the title role of Theater Works’ Sweet Charity, so I tucked away my fear of Simon and headed to Sun City. My source was…
Playwright Charlotte Mann has, according to her playbill bio, an outstanding handbag collection. What she doesn’t have, unfortunately, is a particularly engaging story to tell in Hysteric Studs, which is currently floundering on a late-night stage near you. I was surprised and sorry to see a mediocre production from Stray…
To this critic’s eye, a stage full of fake plants never looks like the real thing, and usually prefigures a production as false as silk-and-wire foliage. But D. Martyn Bookwalter’s gorgeous set for Arizona Theatre Company’s Talley’s Folly is as real as the people who walk through its lush, expertly…
It’s been said that Noel Coward’s Private Lives is foolproof; that it’s such a well-written, tightly strung play that even a third-rate company can’t mess it up. But this isn’t something that’s being said by people who’ve been to Phoenix Theatre recently. There, despite the efforts of one leading lady,…
Over at the Herberger Theater Center, Cathy Dresbach is playing an extraordinarily ordinary woman. In Actors Theatre’s Frame 312, Dresbach is pretending to be Lynette, a typical suburbanite with a house, a yard, and two grown children — an angst-ridden daughter hooked on antidepressants, and a greedy son whose marriage…
There are things about On Strivers Row — a handful of performances, a couple of funny line readings — worth waiting around for. But only if the many moments that surround these praiseworthy crumbs don’t drive you from Black Theatre Troupe’s borrowed space at Phoenix College, where the company is…
at the..
In a town where every arts organization is struggling to stay afloat, who would risk bankrolling an experimental, ethnocentric theater company devoted to producing the work of a single playwright? And who but a lunatic would invest in a theater company run by a man who refuses to promote the…
It’s a safe bet that one of the very first performances of the season will almost certainly live on as the best of the season, because it’s hard to imagine any other actor outshining Benjamin Stewart’s Big Daddy in Actors Theatre’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Stewart’s…
Paula Vogel is some kind of a genius for having written a play about pedophilia that’s both amusing and provocative. While ASU’s mainstage production of How I Learned to Drive doesn’t entirely do Vogel’s work justice, it’s just sturdy enough to evoke the rage and ardor of the playwright’s bold,…
Phoenix Theatre’s excellent production of Chicago is both a pleasant entertainment and a shrewd example of this 83-year-old company’s talent for mounting crowd-pleasing retreads. Director/choreographer Michael Barnard has borrowed from Chicago’s original 1975 staging and from the recent film version, and jazzed it up with some swell tricks of his…
Admit it. The moment you hear the name ABBA, or see it in print, a jangly bit of one of the band’s hit songs begins playing in your head. Maybe you hear the chugging intro to “Waterloo.” Or the a cappella choral bridge from “Super Trouper.” Probably it’s the piano…
The theater season is about to start — and not a moment too soon. With next to no theater to look at for the past several months, I’ve taken to watching television — and the worst possible programs, too. It’s with more than a little shame that I admit to…
Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins looks great on paper: a musical in which four assassins and five failed would-be killers sing and dance about the joys of killing or trying to kill presidents and other VIPs. And, in fact, Assassins is a darkly brilliant musical full of astonishingly naughty humor and wicked…
I normally don’t review children’s theater, but the temptation to watch several dozen teenagers drown was too great, and so I attended an evening performance of Valley Youth Theatre’s Titanic last week. I’ve seen this show once before, enacted by adults, and so I knew what I was in for:…
A guy in a gown is usually good for a laugh, and the mere mention of a beauty pageant these days elicits at least a good, loud snicker. Thus Pageant — The Musical, a drag show that’s more than a drag show; a musical spoof that takes shots at beauty…
It’s true: There’s nothing new under the sun. But if we’re doomed to repeat ourselves — and the summer reruns on Valley stages lately suggest that we most certainly are — then we might as well make it a repeat like Skimpies, the Terry Earp musical spoof that recently launched…
I arrived at Desert Stages thinking Whatever dreck I see tonight is exactly what I deserve. And How desperate for a paycheck am I? And You know it’s summer in Phoenix when you’re driving for half an hour to see a community theater production of Cabaret. I left the theater…
If more part-time thespians approached their craft with the skill and imagination of Steven J. Scally, community theater would be a more cheerful place to visit. If Scally launched Awake and Sing Productions — which took its first bows last week with a revival of Michael Cristofer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The…
The curtain has fallen on another theater season, one that featured a couple of world premieres, the usual dozen-odd Neil Simon retreads, and a handful of pleasant surprises. Chief among those surprises was that the most stunning productions of the season came from one of our tiniest companies. Nearly Naked…
