Herbert Paine

A joyful revival that reanimates the spirit of the show that once jolted Broadway.

Lean and evocative, funny and frightening, tender and profane...reckoning with how to survive trauma.

Mounted with in-the-round polish and flair, Hale Centre Theatre’s GUYS AND DOLLS is bright, brassy, and built on rhythm. And for a few hours in Gilbert, the neon-drenched skyline glows, the dice roll, and Broadway’s Golden Age feels very much alive.

The play is suffused with the sympathetic wisdom that defines Wilson’s writing. He looks at lives many would dismiss as small or defeated and finds in them an undeniable nobility.

COME FROM AWAY makes you care with a humility and vigor that feel bracingly out of step with our more cynical age.

Titled after Neil Diamond’s 1976 album of the same name, A BEAUTIFUL NOISE: THE NEIL DIAMOND MUSICAL aims for something more intimate and riskier than the average jukebox musical. Rather than simply charting a performer’s rise to fame, it presents a man in conversation with his past where he’s both haunted and sustained by the songs he wrote to survive it. The structure is unorthodox and quietly daring.

Tom Noga's clear-eyed direction and riveting performances by the ensemble make for a stirring production of a timely and relevant play...APPROPRIATE!

This sparkling musical is a brand of theater that’s all surface and shimmer and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. A showbiz fantasy at full throttle making you feel delightfully upbeat.

Director Jodie Weiss understands the play's challenge and meets it head-on, shaping the production with an ear for the material’s alternating currents of terror and fragile joy.

Arizona Theatre Company’s HEIST, directed with style and clockwork precision by Matt August, is the kind of production that reminds you how elastic the boundaries of live theatre can be.

In a theatrical era where standing ovations are dispensed like party favors, THE BOOK OF MORMON at ASU Gammage on its opening night elicited a reaction that felt less like polite approval and more like an arena rock concert. Audiences weren’t just clapping, they were erupting, unable to contain their sheer delight.

A 2 hour, high-voltage, rock ‘n roll joyride with the founding fathers of rock ‘n’ roll.

Theatre Artists Studio’s THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT is a whirlwind of wit, whimsy, and moral purpose. An imaginative, brisk, and highly entertaining staging.

The Phoenix Theatre Company’s production of A CHRISTMAS CAROL arrives as both a tribute and a celebration: a tribute to the late Alan Ruch, whose melodic and heartfelt score anchors the show, and a celebration of community, renewal, and theatrical craft.

REYKJAVIK is less a play to be solved rather than a mood to be inhabited. That may frustrate some, but for others, it’s the kind of theater that embraces mystery, that resists tidy endings, that thrives in the uncanny spaces between genres.

Only on Broadway can a show this proudly preposterous, this shamelessly corny, sneak up on the skeptics and knock the wind out of them. SHUCKED, the goofy little musical that could, arrives at ASU Gammage in Tempe like a hayride crashing into a punch bowl.

A rare sequel that understands what made part one beloved, sweeping the audience up in a storm of feeling. It gives us what musicals once promised: a world heightened enough to believe that, like Elphaba, emotion itself can fly.

A big-hearted, crowd-pleasing production that wraps nostalgia, comedy, and a festive score into one joyful package.

Guest contributor David Appleford gives a grateful glowing green light to Childsplay’s production of RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER.