Stage Write

The Phoenix Theatre closes its 30 th season with a delightful show specifically geared towards women. Love, Loss, and What I Wore offers a string of brief vignettes about momentous events in women’s lives and the clothes they associate them. Nora Ephron’s ode to her closet and the memories each item holds is sweet and endlessly relatable. Like the films that made her famous (When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail) the play is both funny and touching. The dialogue quickly jumps from one person to the next in the five-person cast. The production could have been cliché, embracing generalizations about women and their love of shopping and clothes. Instead it focuses on the feelings that a piece of clothing can ignite in a person: nostalgia, regret, longing, excitement, etc. Any woman can identify, not because we all love clothes, but because we all have stories of love and loss that make us who we are. Men can obviously also identify with those feelings, but they might not remem...

The Phoenix Theatre has announced its 2013/14 Indianapolis season.    Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike By Christopher Durang September 19 – October 20, 2013 2012 Tony Award-winner for Best Play It’s a lovely day at Vanya and Sonia’s farmhouse in Bucks County, PA. But instead of spending the morning strolling through their cherry orchard, these wacky siblings have their hands full with a soothsayer/cleaning woman, a neighborhood costume party, and a surprise visit from their movie star sister, Masha, and her studly new boy-toy, Spike. This explosively funny, laugh-out-loud Broadway smash-hit marks the eighth Christopher Durang production at the Phoenix Theatre – with the playwright at his affectionate, unpredictable best. Rancho Mirage By Stephen Dietz October 24 – November 24, 2013 NNPN Rolling World Premiere From the playwright of Yankee Tavern and Becky’s New Car comes this National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere. On this comedic journey into...

The Singing Sanders Family, a group of talented musicians, visits a tiny church in 1938. The result is a fun night of bluegrass gospel music with a huge dose of humor. The show premiered at Beef & Boards Dinner Theatre in 2007 and quickly became a huge crowd favorite. The theatre hosted two sequels to the show in the following years and now has brought back the original. The plucky family is made up of half a dozen unique individuals. The talented group plays 28 different instruments throughout the show; everything from a tambourine to an upright bass make their way into the songs. The patriarch Burl and Vera, his scripture-spouting wife have three children. There are the twins, Denise and Dennis, both quick to explain who the boy is and who the girl is. Then there’s the delightful June, the only family member without a gift for song.   Burl’s brother Stanley is the final piece in the puzzle.   Much of the original cast returns to reprise their roles. Beef ...