Arts & Culture in Phoenix

Arizona Curriculum Theater Inc. is a non-profit troupe of actors, artists, and musicians performing primarily in schools and libraries across Arizona. ACT, Inc. also performs three public productions throughout the year and is a resident company at Soul Invictus, 1022 Grand Ave., Phoenix, AZ.

Originally established as the Phoenix Players in 1920, Phoenix Theatre operated out of the Phoenix Little Theatre for almost 30 years before settling into its current location. The 1952 building would become the core of the city’s cultural area, later drawing such establishments as the Phoenix Art Museum and Phoenix Library. The company’s current performance space does little to draw the audience’s attention away from the stage, save for the crisscross of industrial railings that support the catwalks and the retired jerseys of older playwrights.

In the interest of enchanting family audiences, Great Arizona Puppet Theater has not only replaced human actors with marionettes and rod puppets but also replaced the bears in Goldilocks's story with sharks. Goldilocks & the Three Sharks parades vibrant sea creatures across the stage as the heroine, now a mermaid, acts out her legend against luminous black lights. This inventive take on an old myth is par for the course at the theater, whose adaptation of Cinderella won the 2010 UNIMA-USA Citation of Excellence in puppetry. Behind the scenes, professional puppeteers guide the characters through kid-friendly narratives, both ancient and original. Their performances often include a timely moral that parents can discuss with children with the help of accompanying study guides, which encourage guests to analyze themes and ask questions such as "how can puppets talk if they have no brains?"

The puppet masters have more than 50 tales in their collective memory. They perform them in the historical, hand-painted theater space five days a week, as well as at area schools and functions. By crafting scripts that address Arizonian themes, including the conservation of endangered condors and figures in Native American folklore, they hope to educate and engage their young spectators. Guests can interact with the stories even further by adopting puppets from the onsite gift shop or by attending a private party, where they create their own hand puppets out of paper bags. Additionally, seasonal adult shows prove that puppetry can be as edgy as any other art form.

Grand Canyon University’s theater students involve themselves in every aspect of the school’s theatrical productions, from acting, directing, and lighting to set construction. The university hosts an array of productions in its 311-seat Ethington Theatre, whose intimate space brings audiences close enough to hear every dialogue exchange and see the puppet strings attached to each actor’s limbs.

Stand Up Live aims for a blend of the classic and the edgy, in the comics it welcomes and the ambience it creates alike. Table seating surrounds three sides of the intimate stage in a room bounded by a rough, time-worn brick wall bearing a graffiti-style mural of the club’s name. At those tables, guests crack up over selections from a menu of burgers, shareable Southwestern dishes, and fruit-filled cocktails—bartenders are especially proud of their mojitos and frozen daiquiris. The club also offers free, covered parking for three hours for every guest so that cars don’t get too spooked by the loud laughter and run off.

The Dinner Detective's troupe of talented actors engages audiences with an evening of laughs, intrigue, and suspense as mock murder accompanies a four-course meal where everyone in attendance is a suspect. A dressed-down cast of professional Hollywood- and Chicago-trained sleuths circulate through the crowd, sniffing out phony alibis and asking the hard questions to solve the mystery of each whodunit. Before the night is over, the fictional criminal is cuffed, and the most accurately detecting diner takes home a prize package.

The Dinner Detective leases out its gumshoes to clean up crime during private events such as fundraisers, family reunions, or embezzlement hearings. The thespians have sharpened their entertaining chops by performing for Fortune 500 companies such as Universal Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering.