Although playwright David Lindsay-Abaire is known for his absurdist humor, impossible characters and unexpected quirks, his Rabbit Hole is a serious and entirely conventional drama dealing with grief — perhaps the worst grief possible, the death of a child. Bereaved mother Becca is a rigid perfectionist, given to baking sophisticated…
Set in 1964, when the Second Vatican Council was convening, Doubt tells the story of a priest who may have molested a twelve-year-old boy — who just happens to be the sole black kid in the predominantly Irish and Italian school where the priest teaches — and the nun determined…
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…
Under new artistic director Philip C. Sneed, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival offered A Child’s Christmas in Wales last year. Now the show is back, but three new members in the six-actor cast offer an object lesson on the ways in which performances alone can shape the way we experience a…
An O. Henry Christmas. Amid the cascade of Christmas Carol remounts, Hallmark Card family shows and limp holiday parodies, this musical arrangement of two O. Henry short stories — “The Last Leaf” and “The Gift of the Magi,” created by Peter Ekstrom — is a refreshing option. “The Gift of…
Gary Culig has been playing the reluctant Macy’s elf, Crumpet, in The SantaLand Diaries at the Bug for the last decade; there are people in this town who have faithfully attended every single year. But Culig is now living in New York and has found it more and more difficult…
An O. Henry Christmas. Amid the cascade of Christmas Carol remounts, Hallmark Card family shows and limp holiday parodies, this musical arrangement of two O. Henry short stories — “The Last Leaf” and “The Gift of the Magi,” created by Peter Ekstrom — is a refreshing option. “The Gift of…
I saw Yasmina Reza’s Art soon after it came out, on a visit to London with my daughter, Anna. Afterward, standing on the platform of the underground, we were accosted by a woman who had glimpsed us at the theater — an abrasive New Yorker — who wanted to know…
An O. Henry Christmas. Amid the cascade of Christmas Carol remounts, Hallmark Card family shows and limp holiday parodies, this musical arrangement of two O. Henry short stories — “The Last Leaf” and “The Gift of the Magi,” created by Peter Ekstrom — is a refreshing option. “The Gift of…
William Gibson, who died recently at the age of 94, is best known for his play The Miracle Worker, and for making a star of the luminous Anne Bancroft, who played the lead on Broadway and later in the movie. The play tells the story of Annie Sullivan, a young…
I saw the Broadway version of The Producers when the touring company came to Denver four years ago. It was one of those shows you knew you had to praise: The New York critics were so excited about it that dissenting would make you sound like a bad-tempered provincial. And…
An O. Henry Christmas. Amid the cascade of Christmas Carol remounts, Hallmark Card family shows and limp holiday parodies, this musical arrangement of two O. Henry short stories — “The Last Leaf” and “The Gift of the Magi,” created by Peter Ekstrom — is a refreshing option. “The Gift of…
Sometimes I don’t understand the decision-making at Germinal Stage Denver. I’ve had some of the most stimulating evenings of my life in this homey, cozy, unchanging little theater where — as the website blurb assures us — the actors are never more than thirty feet from your nose. I’ve seen…
Fat Pig. Neil LaBute’s plays are nasty, but they usually contain subtext, irony and ambiguity. Fat Pig has none of these. It’s flat and thin, a straightforward, almost schematic story with a quivering pink core. Tom, a shallow careerist male of the kind we remember from In the Company of…
Amid the cascade of Christmas Carol remounts, Hallmark family shows and limp holiday parodies, Peter Ekstrom’s An O. Henry Christmas, now being staged by Miners Alley, is a refreshing seasonal choice. We all remember “The Gift of the Magi”: A young couple, dirt poor and madly in love, have no…
Ovid, otherwise known as Publius, has been banished from Rome and is traveling with Tiresias, standing at a crossroads, sticking out his thumb. Actually, he’s packed Tiresias in his bag, which the blind seer fiercely resents. In a fit of fury, Ovid burned the single copy of his epic poem…
Fat Pig. Neil LaBute’s plays are nasty, but they usually contain subtext, irony and ambiguity. Fat Pig has none of these. It’s flat and thin, a straightforward, almost schematic story with a quivering pink core. Tom, a shallow careerist male of the kind we remember from In the Company of…
Three misfit high school students in Salem, Oregon, come together on the debate society. Solomon longs to be a professional reporter and wants to reveal the right-wing mayor’s pederast activities in the school newspaper; Howie, a transfer student anxious to create a gay-straight alliance, is frustrated by his inability to…
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…
Playwright Neil LaBute is a king of nasty, but I’ve also always thought of him as tough-minded, daring and original. Now that I’ve seen Fat Pig, though, I’m wondering whether I’ve been fooled. Is it just that nastiness almost always strikes us as clever; that we tend to think the…
The gang at Heritage Square Music Hall has invented a form of theater entirely its own — a combination of scripted and improvised lines, audience interactions, clever jokes and silly jokes that repeat in every show, and we’d be disappointed if they didn’t: What would be the point of a…
During intermission at The Glass Menagerie, I encountered a very beautiful girl in the ladies’ room — dark-haired, pale, slender, someone who might well be cast as the ethereal Laura Wingfield herself someday. She wanted to know if I liked the production. Yes, I said. She did, too, she said,…
