The moment you walk into the theater for Curse of the Starving Class, you know you’re in Sam Shepard country — a place suffused with memories of the mythic Old West, but where the breadth and purity of that myth serve only to underline the disappointing realities of contemporary life…
Bubs is a crossover production, a play accompanied by songs, a concert yoked to a narrative, and that’s not a bad thing: Crossovers attract new people to an art form that everyone seems to agree is in trouble (though we’ve been worrying about theater for decades, and it never does…
The characters in Twelve Angry Men are straight-up ’50s stereotypes: the wishy-washy adman; the mindless sports fanatic; the pathetic old guy whose life is lonely and filled with regret; the onetime slum kid; the paranoid racist; the Eastern European immigrant — Jewish, no doubt — who, bearing the heavy weight…
The Eyes of Babylon. Jeff Key is an ex-Marine — a man devoted to the idea of patriotism and service to his country — whose homosexuality represents a deep part of his psyche. He left the service in part because of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but also…
At the very beginning of his one-man piece, Jeff Key appears in his underwear, so the first thing you find yourself focusing on is his beautifully toned body, an image to which your mind returns periodically — and pleasurably — throughout the course of this very serious and soul-searching exploration…
In many years of faithful attendance at Heritage Square Music Hall, I have never seen T.J. Mullin lose control of an audience. Sure, he always gives the jokers in the seats some play, letting them interrupt or yell out a comment or two — but he was having serious trouble…
Iraq War, the Musical. Unlike so many political satires, Iraq War, the Musical has teeth. It’s a sustained and ultimately serious attack on the Bush administration’s war and the lies told by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney in order to launch it. Through skits and songs, writer-creator Paul Cross tells the…
Two men in a room together: the torturer and the tortured. This is Uruguay in the early 1970s, and the victim is Pedro, a member of the revolutionary Tupamaros. The man who controls the torture — though he doesn’t administer it personally — is a colonel in the fascist country’s…
Iraq War, the Musical! has what so many political satires lack: teeth. It’s a sustained and ultimately serious attack on the Bush administration’s war and the lies told by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Writer-creator Paul Cross has clearly done a great deal of research on the topic, and through skits…
The Hot L Baltimore. Director Terry Dodd has arranged one of the sweetest, smartest, loveliest evenings of theater you’ll ever have, by staging Lanford Wilson’s The Hot L Baltimore in the lobby of the Barth Hotel. The play is a kind of extended tone poem about life in a seedy hotel filled…
One of the things I love about Buntport is how the company comes at a subject from a genuinely original, sideways angle. Dramas based on Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers are usually romantic swashbucklers. But the Buntporters, who create their scripts through a collaborative process, were more intrigued by news…
The Hot L Baltimore. Director Terry Dodd has arranged one of the sweetest, smartest, loveliest evenings of theater you’ll ever have, by staging Lanford Wilson’s The Hot L Baltimore in the lobby of the Barth Hotel. The play is a kind of extended tone poem about life in a seedy hotel filled…
I wanted to sing along to the pulse-quickening rendition of “This Land Is Your Land” that closes Woody Guthrie’s American Song — as the cast of this Colorado Shakespeare Festival production was urging us to do, and everyone around me was doing — but I couldn’t, because I was crying…
The man onstage (the character is actually called Man) begins by telling us he’s an unreliable narrator, and goes on to prove it in scene after scene. He tells a story about how he ran into Belinda, the girl he loved in high school twelve years earlier — or perhaps…
Henry VIII. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is not the licentious, swollen-bellied, wife-dispatching monster we know from Hollywood. When we meet this Henry, he’s relatively young, under the thumb of the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, and still consorting with his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. As the action proceeds, he’ll divorce Katharine for…
By staging Lanford Wilson’s The Hot L Baltimore in the lobby of the Barth Hotel, director Terry Dodd has arranged one of the sweetest, smartest, loveliest evenings of theater you’ll ever enjoy in Denver. The Barth is home to many indigent seniors suffering physical or mental disabilities; it’s one of…
Buddy…The Buddy Holly Story is basically a concert attached to a flimsy afterthought of a plot. Buddy Holly was one of the pioneers of rock and roll, and a huge influence on the musicians who followed him. He rose from obscurity as a country singer in Texas and then created…
Henry VIII. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is not the licentious, swollen-bellied, wife-dispatching monster we know from Hollywood. When we meet this Henry, he’s relatively young, under the thumb of the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, and still consorting with his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. As the action proceeds, he’ll divorce Katharine for…
I couldn’t help worrying when I heard that End Days, the new play being mounted by Curious Theatre Company, featured Stephen Hawking, Jesus Christ, a goth girl and a teenage boy who dresses as Elvis — not to mention 9/11. Such a semi-hip assemblage seemed to signify a young playwright…
The king in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is not the licentious, swollen-bellied, wife-dispatching monster we know from Hollywood. When we meet this Henry, he’s relatively young, under the thumb of the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, and still consorting with his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. As the action proceeds, he’ll divorce Katharine…
Love’s Labour’s Lost. Director Gavin Cameron-Webb has set this production in a summer house in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1917, just before America’s entrance into the First World War. The proceedings open with a long mime sequence, showing the flirtatious Jaquenetta being courted by her two swains — the absurd…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
