CATCHING UP AGAIN

posted by James Reel

I’ve been fighting an insidious cold for about a week, and haven’t spent much time in the studio, which means I’ve neglected the blog. Let me try to catch up a little with links to my material in last week’s Tucson Weekly, just before it’s time to replace it all with new stuff. Here’s how the first review starts:

Donald Margulies won a Pulitzer for his play _Dinner With Friends_, but that doesn't mean it's either an epic or a spectacle in the tradition of such winning plays as _August: Osage County, Rent, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches_ or _The Kentucky Cycle_. It's a smaller, tighter work more in the manner of _Doubt, Proof_ and _Wit_. Indeed, at first glance, the subject of _Dinner With Friends_ seems mundane: how four people are affected by divorce. What makes Margulies' comedy/drama Pulitzer-worthy is its slightly unusual angle: This is not so much an account of how relationships fall apart as a consideration of how they might hold together. Beowulf Alley Theatre Company has just opened a strong production of _Dinner With Friends_, deftly directed by Susan Arnold.

And if that boring lede doesn’t dissuade you from pursuing the evaluation, you can do so here. Then, on to a second review:

Gaslight Theatre thrives on musical spoofs of various brands of genre fiction, but right now, it's returning to its late-1970s roots in Western melodrama. The latest bit of horseplay is called The Ballad of Two-Gun McGraw, and it's everything this sort of show should be, if you can figure out what that is.

Find out what my idea of that is here.