Phoenix Music Blog

Joan Marcus

No need to pay too much attention to the mist, the boat, or the candles: She'll sing about them in a few minutes.

​Is the Phantom of the Opera a ghost with supernatural powers, or is he just your typical freaky, deformed cellar-dweller who skulks around the opera house playing scary, steampunky tricks to manipulate the management into doing his bidding? That's just one of the details I shouldn't reveal to anyone who's never seen the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical spectacular. And I assume there still are such people, because I was one of them until the other night, dutifully staying away from something that I assumed had little to offer real, genuine, snotty theatergoers like me.

So I have nothing to compare this current tour to: no Michael Crawford or Sarah Brightman, no London, no Broadway. It's still produced by Cameron Mackintosh, features the late Maria Björnson's marvelous original designs for the set and costumes, and is directed by Hal Prince.

Just a sample of the cuteness that is Church Basement Ladies

​Last summer, I took advantage of time alone in a friend's lovely Seattle home to curl up and read several books from his home library, including Jennifer Michael Hecht's The Happiness Myth. It looks at how modern life stresses and drains us and identifies five tried-and-true historic aspects of human behavior that contribute to joy and contentment. One is "celebration." Unsavory as it may sometimes sound, we need to get together regularly with other members of our community and have a really large party based on something we all value.

I was reminded of this while watching Church Basement Ladies, a somewhat lightweight popular new musical comedy that's stopping in Mesa right now on its national tour. You don't have to be a small-town Scandinavian Lutheran at the annual Christmas lutefisk supper in Cornucopia, Minnesota, to get the benefits of celebration, but it does make it more inevitable.

​Scotty Jeffers, a talented and popular Valley actor and musician who'd graced our stages continuously ever since his Washington High School days, died suddenly Saturday night, October 31, at the age of 38, from what friends were told was cardiac arrest triggered by a pulmonary embolism. He had just completed a performance of Childsplay's Androcles and the Lion and was recently featured in Talk Radio at Chyro's Voice Theatre. (Because I never got to know Jeffers well, my strongest memory of his unique and engaging talents remains his 2004 performance of original music for Stray Cat Theatre's Poona the Fuckdog, brandishing a guitar while dressed as a giant penis.)

The performing arts community in which Jeffers had so many longtime friends and colleagues has banded together in their shock and grief to both mourn and celebrate a great guy. We ♥ Scotty Jeffers, a Facebook group with more than 350 members and growing, is all abuzz with info on upcoming events, which began this evening with an informal karaoke party at the Bunkhouse, 4428 North 7th Avenue. All tip money was donated to Jeffers' family to help with medical, travel, and other expenses in these unexpected circumstances. You can also make a donation via PayPal or Google Checkout at a link on Stray Cat's site.

courtesy of Arizona Curriculum Theater

James David Porter explains his perfectly reasonable behavior as the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" in Poe.

​A new educational performance company is in town, scaring your kids and introducing them to actual literature. And they are kicking ass at it, based on the public performances of Poe that Arizona Curriculum Theater is currently presenting at Soul Invictus. (The Emily Dickinson programming in their catalog might not be as creepy -- but who am I to say?)

If you have any say in who gets hired as visiting artists at a school, I urge you to try to include these guys in the mix: top-notch professional actors who take control with the sheer attracting force of their compelling talent. Then, with the students in their thrall, the company apparently employs its skills and experience in making young people have fun and learn stuff -- including respect for the power of language and good old-fashioned damn good writing, to balance out all their exposure to Kanye and the Saw series, for example.

©2009 Arizona Broadway Theatre

Gina Handy (center) and the cast of Anything Goes rock us on the waters.

​Tap-dancing has become kind of a specialty thing, though maybe I'm the only person who ever found it mainstream. Anyway, you don't see tap numbers frequently, and sometimes when you do see one, the shoes don't all have taps on them and the orchestra plays really loud so you can't hear that the timing is not militarily precise. (Because it's a hard thing to do.)

Not so at Arizona Broadway Theatre right now -- they've got microphones right there on the stage floor so you can hear every perfectly executed time step and cramp roll in their current production of Anything Goes. With Cole Porter numbers that include the title tune, "I Get a Kick Out of You," "You're the Top," "Friendship," and "It's De-lovely," this show barely needs production numbers, a plot, or even a chair for me to sit in, but there they are, running our cups over with terrificness. Win-win-win.

Mark Gluckman Photography

If you like piña coladas, gin and tonic, whiskey and soda, and margaritas, you're the accomplice Dominik Rebilas and Debra Rich (pictured) have looked for.

​Last week, we talked about Curtains (the musical mystery) here in Curtains (the online theater review column at PHXmusic.com). In another of those crazy coincidences, this week's review is of another thriller (but without songs) by one of Curtains' (the play's) several authors, Rupert Holmes, who was, for decades, best known for writing Drood (originally titled The Mystery of Edwin Drood) and "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)." Brownie honor. (He writes novels, too, apparently, and, long, long ago, wrote "Timothy," the Buoys' hit about trapped coal miners resorting to cannibalism. Rock and roll!)

This is a man we should all put on our "people real or imaginary, living or dead, with whom we'd like to have lunch" list, because hey, imagine what all must be knocking around in Mr. Holmes' brain at any given moment. Put his talents together with those of the members of Theatre Artists Studio, which is currently presenting his play Accomplice, and you've got a tasty morsel of funny, pointed, richly layered metamystery. I don't particularly like the genre, but any chart-scorching pop artist who's got a pile of Edgars at home to keep his Tonys company will get me out of the house to see what he's up to.

Laura Durant

Rusty Ferracane plays Cioffi in Curtains.

​If this is your first visit to this particular blog feature, I should probably point out that it's always called "Curtains" -- we thought it was a cool name for a theater review column -- but this week the play I saw is also called Curtains; someone thought it was a cool title for a musical comedy mystery set in the seamy underbelly of the professional theater community. And it is.

This is a show that was on Broadway quite recently, and David Hyde Pierce was allegedly completely adorable in it. Rusty Ferracane is, too, in Phoenix Theatre's current production. He plays a starry-eyed homicide detective named Frank Cioffi who shows up backstage after the out-of-town opening of a new musical. The leading lady who'd collapsed during curtain call is now dead, and foul play is suspected, so one of those terrific "one of you is the killer and we all have to stay here" plots is set in motion.

Sandy High and David Vigari, as Judy and Jim, enjoy a rare moment of serenity and hope in Rebel Without a Cause.

​It's always been rough to be a teenager (or to know one), but up until about 50 years ago, you could count on going to war, marrying young, and/or working your butt off for a living to distract you from hormonal storms, existential angst, and the cruel disappointment of finding out what human nature and adulthood are really like.

courtesy of Actors Theatre

Michael Pearce Donley, Bob Stromberg and Bill Arnold

​One of my favorite "little musicals" ever, ever, ever is Oil City Symphony. I could eat eggplant Parmigiana and watch that show for five, six days in a row and not need another diversion. You don't see Oil City produced a lot these days, maybe partly because the four original cast members all sang like birds who could alternately warble and belt and included two pianists, a drummer and two other percussionists, and the assorted abilities to play accordion, synthesizer, vibraslap, violin, saxophone, flute, and slide whistle.

But it was about high-school music geeks who'd grown up and never lost their love of performing, of having special talents, of sharing joy with an audience in a way that helps smooth over the glitches of real-life, backstage relationships. That spirit lives on, somewhat, in the three-man mini-extravaganza that is Triple Espresso, currently being presented by Actors Theatre.

Douglas Monce

Carson Saline and Michael Cortez are even prettier than this in Leading Ladies.

​No one really doubts that professional entertainers are as maddeningly human as the rest of us. Nevertheless, the nostalgic farces of contemporary playwright Ken Ludwig mine comic gold from pondering that mystery. Typically, two groups of characters bump both literally and figuratively into each other: talented, worn-out, disillusioned "stars" and the earnest, art-loving, starstruck people with whom they long to exchange lives, even if only for a night.

Leading Ladies, one of Ludwig's newest, is brand-new to the community theater circuit. The relative unfamiliarity of the title may be (along with "the economy, stupid") putting a dent in Mesa Encore Theatre's ticket sales. But hustle yourself out there this final weekend, because the production is a hilarious, solidly produced, no-holds-barred romp.

courtesy of Theater Works

From left, Ken Goodenberger, Bo Allen, and Ginger Morby are legen . . . wait for it! -- dary in Camelot.

​The theater season has officially begun in our little cultural sweatbox, and that means more of the musicals have live orchestras again. This is great news, and it makes Theater Works' current production of Camelot just that much less dreary.

The score has great, popular, memorable songs that audience members cheerfully sing along with, even during the overture. The plot, based on several legends that've been Frankensteined together through centuries of pseudo-history and literary movements, is an illogical outrage. The romance is adulterous, overblown, and cheesy. But this show definitely does skirt a few of the pitfalls, and I'll admit it has its moments. Moments that are needles in a three-hour, glute-numbing haystack, but still.

John Groseclose

Michael Peck is Barry Champlain in Talk Radio.

​It's been 25 years this summer since Denver talk-radio host Alan Berg was murdered in his own driveway by one of his white-supremacist anti-fans. Eric Bogosian's 1987 play Talk Radio, partly based on Berg's career, just opened at Chyro Arts Venue, serving an unsettling blend of nostalgia, activism, and respectable art.

Ron Nachtwey / Composition Photography

Desiree Vaughan and Nathan Dunn are The Fantasticks.

​Oh, my. 1960 (and what passed for groundbreaking then) was a very long time ago, wasn't it? The longest-running musical ever in the whole world, The Fantasticks, manages to make that very clear while still demonstrating what made it so popular. (Some of that success has got to be mere momentum, though, I swear.)

There's a wise, mysterious narrator, two families in an isolated garden, and their two young-adult children, who find that they need to suffer and make mistakes before they can settle down and be happy together. It sounds a bit like the book of Genesis, but it's officially based on a play by Edmund Rostand that premièred in 1894.

There are allusions to other works, too (Shakespeare and older), some of which are kind of funny. There are several dumb jokes, too, which help redeem the show from appearing to be just another parody of avant-garde creativity like the Hamlet staged in an abandoned warehouse in Hamlet II , or every scene set in a beat coffeehouse ever, or much of my undergraduate career.

I'll take all four: From left, Jeannie Shubitz, Katrina Hogofsky, Shayla Benoit, and Laura Berger are a singing, dancing box of fluffy kittens in The Taffetas.

​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 about any repertoire. Or, if necessary, two or more singers -- like Carol Burnett's medleys with her guest stars, say. And a lot of musicians have some great moves: Tina Turner, Mick Jagger, Madonna, and of course the late Michael Jackson. But watching actors trying to get through a set of scripted, choreographed approximations of what singers do is almost always a little sad.

Some revues are so heavy-handed with the patter and props that the finished product is like something that was so painful to push out, no one wants to actually look at it. And supply and demand creates another problem -- how many good musicians do you know who'll work for what actors get around here? So we audience members cross our fingers and take our chances.

Be their guest: The cast of Beauty and the Beast -- including Thomas Brower (in white wig) and Linsey Maxon (in blue dress) -- cavorting through a typical French meal.

​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 kids all over can enjoy the shows) and give them additional safety and peace of mind on the road, as well. And you can watch the episode this weekend! It airs Sunday, August 9, at 10:30 a.m. on KTVK channel 3. (And I doubt you'll ever see NASCAR mentioned in this column again.)

Okay, on to this week's review. It seems that no matter where you look, some poor young thing is having boyfriend trouble. He's a time traveler, or he's a vampire, or he's a big, hairy, menacing, enchanted beast. (Folktale classifications 425-449, Supernatural or Enchanted Husband or Relative.)

courtesy of Troy Aossey and GAPT

Aaaaarrrr you ready for some piratey puppetry?

​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 the curtain.

Peter Pan III: The Night of Nights is the third and final part of GAPT's somewhat epic James Barrie-based Pan series. As an in-house summer show, it's able to be longer, bigger, and a bit more elaborate than the under-an-hour pieces the company tours with (although I'm sure it could tour if required). A whole slew of ninja-like puppeteers and numerous perky marionettes scamper around atmospheric sets on the venue's big stage. Act I: The Lost Boys' subterranean home. Act II: The deck of Hook's ship. Bring. It. On.

courtesy of Copperstate Dinner Theater

From left to right, a whole bunch of actors named Shari Watts, Jessica Godber, Christi Sweeney, Ryan Jordan, Bo Allen, Roger Prenger, and Charlie LeSueur.

 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 and
b. 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 more than the programming itself does, and the hardworking, theater-lovin' Peter J. Hill and Noel Irick schedule a lot of other, better plays in each Copperstate Dinner Theater season as well. Not only that, Hill has written a brand-new farce, Trust Me, I'm a Doctor, and while still really dumb and somewhat exploitive and offensive, it's head and shoulders above most of its butt-pinching, warhorsey brethren.

Anita Welch is the front end of Kaa, and Kerry Lambert is Mowgli, in Disney's The Jungle Book KIDS

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 on Disney's 78-minute animated version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book for us to know that it's suitable for, you know, kids.

Nevertheless, here it is, and it actually is shorter and dumber than the cartoon. But I'm not a kid, so it doesn't matter quite as much what I think. It'd be great if whatever 4-year-olds enjoy could be fun for the whole family, but that's too much to ask of every single theatergoing experience, as far as I can tell.

courtesy of Arizona Broadway Theatre

Justin Jutras is the swoon-worthy Conrad Birdie in ABT's Bye Bye Birdie.

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 for you, the audience member, to enjoy. Popping with turquoise, tangerine, kelly green, and cherry red, tight little jackets, novelty prints, and argyle and madras for days, Clarke's designs paint the entire picture for every scene.

Kara Thomson's scenic design is also masterful, especially the little vintage touches in the MacAfee family home. And since the set has to be a multipurpose, easily shifted structure, it subtly and appropriately recedes into the background most of the time, which is actually quite an accomplishment for a design that looks like a Mondrian done in a Martha Stewart palette. The muted colors are just the right setoff for the saturated tones of the clothing, and the boldly outlined rectangles reinforce the Space Age-meets-psychedelia world of the show's tumultuous early-'60s setting.

Heather McCloud is April Ann.

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 family business now operates five venues in three states.

When the Hales were road-tripping in the 1950s, they encountered an interesting family who lived on a remote mountaintop in the Canadian Rockies. Ruth and Nathan wrote a play based on the family's lives, April Ann, that's become a staple in the Hale chain. The current Gilbert run is the show's Valley premiere.

Anastasia Paganos

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 Park with George).

Joan Marcus

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 or vocal, and where the sounds fall in the audible-by-humans range.

So I'll give the touring production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which I saw on its first night in the Valley, a bit of a pass -- showing up at a different venue every week has to be challenging, and it's harder for musicians and actors to adjust than it is for the sound crew, too. The theater had completely run out of assisted listening devices at 15 minutes before curtain, which makes me think that regular patrons have gotten used to dealing with the situation.

Heather Hill

Not paper-trained: Jon Gentry and David Dickinson have happy accidents in Rock Paper Scissors.

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 Rock Paper Scissors is a good break.

The play is marketed as suitable for anybody 5 or older, and the whole slew of kids and grownups in the theater seemed to agree. A wordless story with a way cool musical score by Bruno Louchouarn, Rock Paper Scissors has just two characters: Ollie (Jon Gentry), who works at home in what seems to be an extremely boring job, and Yuki (David Dickinson), a young man who pops into Ollie's life one day.

Psychiatric help may be five cents, but the show is free this Thursday, June 4! Pictured: Mandaleigh Blunt and Matthew Crosby.

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 elementary school assignments like book reports and coat-hanger sculpture, and Snoopy the beagle (when he's a dog).

The other elements of Schulz's quirky, inimitable humor -- non sequiturs, '60s pop psych, existential angst, a beagle who's a WWI flying ace -- are lost on a lot of the young folks and also have a hard time reaching their adult targets when, for example, the kid sitting behind you sasses "Wutt?" after every blackout-closing line that he doesn't understand, and later, after apparently having been told those are jokes he doesn't get, switches to forced, raucous laughter over random bits of dialogue.

That's just a caveat -- many 21st-century kids are more practiced theatergoers, and I think children should have the opportunity to see this show; it has a lot to offer and, while they might not sit rapt, they'll have a good time. (Also, my earnest young neighbor cracked me up when he asked his companion, "That's funny 'cause there's no such thing as fish in a barrel. Right?")

courtesy of Fountain Hills Community Theater

The cast of All Shook Up in full effect.

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 people working their little hineys off in musical theater, and it shows.

All Shook Up started to sound interesting when I found out it has a plot (because many shows featuring popular music that wasn't originally written for the show -- a.k.a. "jukebox" musicals -- are little more than tributes or revues). Not only that, some of the plot twists borrow from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, my favorite of the Bard's comedies, so I'm all over that, of course.

courtesy of Space 55 Theatre Ensemble

Krishelle Diaoune, Jordan Tompkins, and Elizabeth Branch (we're pretty sure; see below) in The Seduction of Almighty God.

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 all we know, he's making the whole freaking thing up), celebrating pain and tragedy as he shares his ambiguous yet horrible creations with audiences. I think I like him a lot.

When you're watching a show that makes you feel as though you're in grad school (not necessarily a bad thing), it helps a lot if the company presenting it is smart as a whip and really passionate about the experience everybody's having, so hooray for Space 55 Theatre Ensemble, who's doing a swell job with Barker's fascinating and troubling The Seduction of Almighty God in its U.S. première.

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 terrific in that little outpost of hopelessness, so I'd hold on to it as long as possible. Besides, when you've got a set with several working doors, it's hard to say goodbye to it.

The current resident is Agnes White (Shannon Whirry), a wounded but good-hearted Oklahoman who, despite violence, loss, and other kicks in the pants, has not yet given up on life. Alcohol, country music, and the occasional line of coke help keep her spirits up.

Carol Rosegg

Doug Thompson, Jenny Gulley and Jamie Jackson: Three actors who are not cast members of the tour that's stopping here. But you get the idea.

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! that played a record 2,200 performances on the Vegas Strip) and brings them to us.

Right now we're in the middle of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a relatively new musical based on the spittingly funny 1988 film. Because I dislike musicals so, I'd never even heard of this thing, which played a year and a half on Broadway; turns out it's actually pretty sweet.

John Groseclose

From left, Alex Raines, Amanda Victor, Travis Russell, and Nathalie Cadieux whoop it up in Private Eyes.

First off, I want to make sure you know that Black Theatre Troupe replaced their originally scheduled season closer, Three Sistahs, with a second run of Revenge of a King, which you really ought to catch if you haven't already (it plays through Sunday, May 10). (Read Robrt L. Pela's review of the revival here.)

Okay, on to this week's new review: Honestly, I swear to Dionysus and all his maenads that I didn't choose to see another play about adulterous theater people, directed by the same director and featuring one of the same actors as Tempe Little Theatre's production of Murder Among Friends earlier this year. But that's what I found I was in for when I arrived at Chyro Arts Venue and looked at the program for Chyro's Voice Theatre's production of Private Eyes.

Grand Duchess Barbados (Elizabeth Oates, top) and The Empress (Katie Cathcart) are about to be taken down a peg in The Emperor's New Clothes.

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" would be a cool little fable even if it were only about exposing pretension and exploding the myths of class and taste. But it's also about a ruler who's so obsessed with style and glamor that his empire's real needs are unattended to.

Eric Coble's musical version of the classic fairy tale, currently being presented by Mesa's Stageworks, emphasizes the story's multiple morals while keeping things moving right along with humor, song, and a tasty Caribbean setting. Though the show dragged a bit when I saw it, it was the production's first weekend at Mesa Arts Center, and the company's band of spunky, seasoned performers has probably picked up the pace by now.