HAND-MADE

posted by James Reel

It’s Thursday, which means I have new spew in the Tucson Weekly. This time, a review of two plays and a restaurant. First, the theater story:

Two musicals are running on the eastside right now, and both of them are about people who create things with their hands. All right, that's stretching the point of the Gaslight Theatre show, a spoof of Frankenstein. More straightforward is what just opened by the Da Vinci Players: the mostly blue-collar musical called _Working_. The show is adapted from a 1972 book for which Studs Terkel recorded dozens of people musing about the work they did. Later in the decade, it was turned into a concept musical by Stephen Schwartz, who was then fresh from triumphs as the composer of _Godspell_ and _Pippin_; he is now best-known for _Wicked_. On _Working_, though, Schwartz has had a lot of help from his friends, especially as the show has continued to evolve, updating itself to accommodate the development of computers and barcode scanners. … The characters in _Working_ may have their troubles and disappointments, but all in all, they take pride in what they do. So should the Da Vinci Players. "Pride" is not the first word that comes to mind when the subject is the Gaslight Theatre, a company dedicated to the belief that any prideful character should undergo a pratfall. Gaslight's latest spoof is called _Frankenstein Lives, or the Jolt's on You_. It has less to do with the Mary Shelley novel than the 1930s Boris Karloff movies, and the gravest danger to a show like this is that Mel Brooks created the subject's definitive parody with the film _Young Frankenstein_. To his credit, writer-director Peter Van Slyke has stitched together his own version without seeming at all beholden to Brooks (other than the thunderclaps whenever somebody says "house of Frankenstein," which calls to mind the horses' terror at the mention of Frau Blücher).

You’ll find the full review here, after which you can move along to the Chow section:

A couple of years ago, I heard a rumor that a New York Indian restaurant had sent a headhunter to Tucson in an effort to lure chefs from our city's Indian restaurants. Apparently, it was just too difficult to find good Indian chefs in NYC, but they were easy to come by here. Until this year, all of Tucson's Indian restaurants had been modest family-style places, decorated with depictions of Hindu gods and gurus and sites like the Taj Mahal, and all serving intensely flavorful cuisine from the subcontinent. A few months ago, something different opened in Oro Valley: Saffron Indian Bistro. The food is similar to that already available here, if less spicy, confirming that restaurant heat increasingly dissipates as Tucson diners travel north.

The rest of the review awaits you here.