Though the play itself was hard to embrace at times, a combination of Jacobean revenge tragedy and nineteenth-century melodrama that almost worked, Pierre’s production values were impeccable. Vicki Smith’s set design was elegant and expressive, and Pierre was worth attending just to watch the play of Don Darnutzer’s gorgeous lighting…
Broken Words is a collage of poetry and prose put together and performed by actors Anthony Zerbe and Roscoe Lee Browne. The result is a magnificent evening that includes the words of Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott and W. H. Auden, among others. Both actors are relaxed and consummate…
Though it was warm and celebratory, this Christmas Carol also gave Dickens’s melancholy depiction of poverty in Victorian England its due. The set was ingenious, the costumes sparkled, the child actors were appealing, and Randy Moore gave Scrooge a wistful edge. Take a child this year…
First came Patty Dobrowolski and Nancy Cranbourne in Mrs. Schwartz and Dober, a series of overlapping improvised monologues about the actresses’ lives, including Cranbourne’s bitter-comic re-enactment of her mother’s increasing dementia and her own incomprehension. Then there was the truly mind-boggling Ed: The World Made Dress, written and performed by…
Freak Train is a wild ride through good, bad and ugly forms of personal expression. Rappers, poets, aspiring bards, monologists, puppeteers, karaoke kings and every other permutation of performer turn up to meet, greet and, in some cases, confound the Bug Theatre crowd, which is usually composed of sympathetic fellow…
A pregnant woman enters the house of a kindly trucker, and instantly time stops. The couple embarks on a night that’s outside time and outside what we know as reality. Eventually, there is only the image of Celestina and Anibal holding each other in a glowing otherworldly bubble as rain…
Talking Heads was an exquisite production of two monologues by the wryly enigmatic Englishman Alan Bennett. The acting, by Chris Tabb and Ann Rickhoff, was pitch perfect, as was Richard Pegg’s direction. Everything about the production felt right, from the brown leaves drifting into a pile beneath a bus-stop bench…
The Boulder Rep is still vivid in the minds of most Boulder theater aficionados. Founded by Frank and Ernestine Georgianna in 1974, the company mounted challenging, exquisitely staged contemporary plays and acted in a variety of around-town venues through the year 2000. Frank was a visionary theatrical force through all…
Periodically in fancy women’s clothing stores, like those in the Cherry Creek area, there are special events called “trunk shows.” They are advertised in the papers, and attendees often appear later in the society pages. In these shows, a representative of some haute designer or maker brings in trunks full…
Last year, the Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-332-5582) had a short-lived branch called the Andenken Annex. Situated in the swanky SteelBridge Lofts, the little spot specialized in the work of young artists. Despite its brief run, it cast a long shadow, and though gone, it lives on in Annex…
The choice of a journey often deserves a writer’s attention quite as much as the journey itself. Travel, like dreaming, is a form of emotional satisfaction, and though you may explain the act of dreaming by the cheese eaten at dinner, you cannot explain so easily the particular images which…
Facing a budget shortfall for the last production of his Shadow Theatre Company’s sixth season, artistic director Jeffrey Nickelson decided to make a virtue of necessity. He ditched expensive plans to stage The Old Settler and teamed with associate artistic director Hugo Jon Sayles to create Sweet Corner Symphony, a…
Lawrence Kasdan directs and co-writes (with William Goldman) Dreamcatcher, the latest addition to the Stephen King-adaptation genre, currently at 74 — including film and TV — and counting. According to the Internet Movie Database, this puts King handily ahead of Michael Crichton (23) and Bram Stoker (38); he’s closing in…
Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers) and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…
The French are about as popular at the Pentagon this week as cat food on a croissant, but even the hawks would admit that the Gauls have made some wonderful movies. Among the most stylish and original is 1964’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s bittersweet charmer about a clerk…
Researcher extroardinaire Jane Goodall, who has studied chimpanzees for more than four decades, will distill her expertise this weekend at two events: The Roots & Shoots Discovery stage show for kids and their parents, in Boulder; and the opening of Discovering Chimpanzees: The Remarkable World of Jane Goodall, at the…
Thursday, March 20 If your tastes run toward the old, rare and collectible, you won’t want to miss the World Wide Antique Spring Show at the Denver Merchandise Mart, 451 East 58th Avenue, this weekend. A forty-year tradition, the huge event brings together inventory offered by nearly 200 dealers and…
When composer Johann Sebastian Bach was penning his Concerto in D Major for the violin in 1719, he probably didn’t expect high-flying musicians to leap, spin and do back flips as they played the masterwork. But when it comes to the violin extravaganza known as Barrage, standing still isn’t an…
Two days, sixty bands: The Ultimate Music Xperience is a little bit of everything — talent search, sneak preview, audience-participation event and free-entertainment spectacle. But when the annual Capitol Hill People’s Fair music tryouts are over, musical careers will be cinched — or crushed — as the stage is set…
Forgive me if my age is showing, but I was just out walking when from out of the pawnshop down the street came blaring Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” the song that changed hundreds of rebellious lives back in the moldy ’60s. And it sounded so fresh, Dylan’s urgent…
Like many circus performers, Gregory Popovich was born into the life: A member of a Russian circus family, the renowned juggler and clown starred in the Moscow Circus and worked with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey before turning to his current shtick, Gregory Popovich’s Comedy and Pet Theatre. His…
In the 1981 movie Arthur, dapper John Gielgud played a quintessential English butler forced to put up with the antics of Dudley Moore’s drunken playboy. But that’s nothing like the day-to-day life of real butlers, swears Mary Louise Starkey of Starkey International, the Denver-based service-professional training institute sponsoring this weekend’s…
