Hamlet really is a narcissistic ass. I’m not talking about his famous, almost play-long dithering about whether or not he should kill the uncle who murdered his father and married his mother — and if so, when and how, and what it says about his character that he’s unable to…
Annie. Boulder’s Dinner Theatre is at the top of its form; it has to be. How else could the company make Annie anything but a smirking sentimental bore? As everyone knows by now, the story of Annie concerns a little red-haired girl’s rough life at an orphanage run by the…
Oren Neeman’s Conviction tells a fascinating story about the Spanish Inquisition and the 1486 persecution of Andres Gonzalez, a Catholic priest — a member of a family that had been forced to convert from Judaism — who finds his way back to his own religion through the love of a…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Boulder’s Dinner Theatre is at the top of its form. It has to be. How else could the company make Annie — its mandatory summer family show — anything but a smirking, sentimental bore? Okay, maybe my personal enjoyment was helped along by the fact that I shared my table…
It’s funny how all discussion of the Mafia these days references The Sopranos — that distinctive accent; Carmela’s American-Italian cooking with its thick red sauces; the racism and homophobia; the women who were either protected and indulged family members or whores; the vivid energy of the culture; the sense of…
Two old men are seated at a table talking. They may be on a hotel terrace, in an old-age home, at a hospital. All we know is that the place is by the sea. The men seem sad and beaten down by life; they have odd physical tics and converse…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, in which a man is accused of an unnamed crime and, having faced all kinds of baffling and inexplicable encounters as well as a wall of bureaucratic obstruction, is eventually executed, was published in 1925. In its evocation of the menace lurking in the shadows…
Quilters has a strong local history. Based on the journals and remembrances of pioneer women, it was co-written by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek in the early 1980s at the request of the Denver Center Theatre Company — where it has now returned. The piece is very much a product…
Partway through The Squabble, I did something I’ve never done before in all my years of faithful and happy attendance at Buntport: I glanced at my watch to see how much longer we had to go. Based on Nikolai Gogol’s “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,”…
Bus Stop. A snowstorm has closed the road ahead, and a bus is stranded outside a diner, where worldly-wise owner Grace supervises her high-school-aged waitress, Elma. Among those requiring doughnuts and coffee or bacon and eggs are driver Carl, who is Grace’s occasional lover, and disgraced philosophy professor Gerald Lyman…
Olivia, a fifteen-year-old girl living unhappily with her father, Aaron, and stepmother (who’s never seen on stage and appears to be either vicious or neurotic to the point of pathology), finds herself throwing up uncontrollably for reasons we’ll learn only later in the play. In a fever pitch of loneliness…
52 Pick-Up. The central conceit of this love story involves a pack of cards that two actors scatter, then pick up, one by one, announcing what the card is and reading its caption, which is always something evocative and elliptical, like “What happened?” or “Cities.” That statement cues a brief…
Bus Stop is set in a diner, where worldly-wise owner Grace supervises her high-school-aged waitress, Elma. On this particular night, a snowstorm has closed the road ahead, and a bus is stranded outside. Among those requiring doughnuts and coffee or bacon and eggs are driver Carl, who is Grace’s occasional…
T. S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1917, while the First World War was devastating Europe and imperial absolutes were beginning to crumble. It was the year of the Russian revolution; in two more years, the victorious powers would meet in Paris to reconfigure the…
Eccentricities of a Nightingale. It’s fascinating to observe the different acting styles on stage in this production, and to think about the ways they work with Tennessee Williams’s characters and dialogue. Brian Landis Folkins subsumes his personality to the role he’s playing. Minute by minute, the outlines of the character…
Eccentricities of a Nightingale. It’s fascinating to observe the different acting styles on stage in this production, and to think about the ways they work with Tennessee Williams’s characters and dialogue. Brian Landis Folkins subsumes his personality to the role he’s playing. Minute by minute, the outlines of the character…
Morisot Reclining tells two love stories — both involving great artists of the impressionist period, neither of them consummated. Edouard Manet had a decades-long friendship with Berthe Morisot, who eventually married his brother, and there is great warmth and intensity in the paintings he did of her. Edgar Degas, arrogant…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
It’s fascinating to observe the different acting styles in the Germinal Stage production of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, and to think about the ways they work with Tennessee Williams’s characters and dialogue. When Brian Landis Folkins, who plays John Buchanan, walks on stage, you’re momentarily disappointed, so nondescript and…
Eurydice. Playwright Sarah Ruhl has created her own magical, eccentric, gutsy and entirely original interpretation of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, one in which the Lord of the Underworld is a comic-fearful shape-changer, ruling over a place populated by people of stone; Eurydice’s father, already dead, longs for her from the Underworld…
