Although the critical world seems almost united in proclaiming Death of a Salesman not only Arthur Miller’s best play, but one of the greatest twentieth-century dramas, I have always rather disliked it: the heavy symbolism, the self-consciously poetic language, the endless moralizing and the protagonist’s awful self-pity. To me, the…
The seven founders — and also writer-designer-director-performers — of Buntport Theater are exploring new territory. Known for a prankish and highly literate experimentalism, the team is currently showing Realism: The Mythical Brontosaurus, which, as the title suggests, is pretty much a realistic play. There are no lopped-off limbs here or…
Ain’t Misbehavin’. Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting out,…
I’m not the best audience for a scary show. At the movies, I cover my eyes during the gory parts. I also find that, for the most part, the real world provides all the grief and terror I know how to handle. Nonetheless — despite some moments spent cringing in…
For this ambitious production, Su Teatro artistic director Anthony J. Garcia has transposed the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to modern-day Mexico, intertwining it with contemporary politics and elements of Aztec myth and adding music by composer Daniel Valdez. It’s a fascinating concept, and parts of it work well, but…
Ain’t Misbehavin’. Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting out,…
Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys takes place in a teahouse in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, during the time of apartheid. The Master Harold of the title is a seventeen-year-old boy; during the play, his mother is manifest only as a voice on the phone, and we learn that…
Ain’t Misbehavin’. Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting out,…
More than a decade ago, I attended a production at the Gaslight, a theater in the basement of a beautiful Victorian house in northwest Denver. The play, Bent, was new then and revelatory, a terrifying examination of the plight of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The play seemed almost incongruous in…
Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? I know that Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting…
The Fourth Wall, Playwright A.R. Gurney is a courteous, upper-crust kind of guy, so when he found himself enraged by national politics, he didn’t respond with agitprop or searing realism. Instead he imagined a comfortably middle-class housewife, Peggy, who — by way of protest — rearranges all the furniture in…
At the center of Lynn Nottage’s gentle, appealing play, Intimate Apparel, is the figure of Esther, a black woman in her thirties living in a boardinghouse in 1905 New York City, and — like so many poor and displaced women before and since — making her living as a seamstress…
As a reviewer, I see a lot of theater productions, and it’s rare for me to want to see one for a second time. But Germinal Stage Denver has more than once mounted a play I’d have liked to re-experience. This is because artistic director Ed Baierlein picks works that…
The Denver Center Theatre Company is beginning its first season under new artistic director Kent Thompson, former director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Thompson, 51, took the reins from Donovan Marley, who announced his retirement in January 2004, after 22 years. Theater buffs are wondering what to expect from the…
Assassins. Assassins seethes through the mind like an unsettling wind, hurling aside platitude and raising a host of tormenting questions. This brilliant musical by John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim is exactly the kind of project local companies should be undertaking. It tells the story of nine people who either assassinated…
Assassins seethes through the mind like an unsettling wind, hurling aside platitude and raising a host of tormenting questions. This brilliant musical by John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim is exactly the kind of project local companies should be taking on — and kudos to Next Stage for doing so. Sondheim…
In the ladies’ room during the intermission of The Dead Guy, I heard one woman say to another, “Every play they do here has some kind of message.” “What do you see as the message of this one?” asked her friend. A pause. “Oh, you know, how shallow television is.”…
The Fourth Wall. Playwright A.R. Gurney is a courteous, upper-crust kind of guy, so when he found himself enraged by national politics, he didn’t respond with agitprop or searing realism. Instead he imagined a comfortably middle-class housewife, Peggy, who — by way of protest — rearranges all the furniture in…
I loved this production of The Fourth Wall when I saw it at the late lamented Nomad Theatre — directed, as now, by Billie McBride and featuring the same cast — and I fully expected to love it again at the Avenue. But I didn’t. The script remains witty and…
The Fourth Wall. Playwright A.R. Gurney is a courteous, upper-crust kind of guy, so when he found himself enraged by national politics, he didn’t respond with agitprop or searing realism. Instead he imagined a comfortably middle-class housewife, Peggy, who — by way of protest — rearranges all the furniture in…
In 1955, when Inherit the Wind was written, religious attacks on evolution seemed safely in America’s past, and authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee weren’t so much re-arguing the topic as using it as a metaphor for the stifling of thought in the McCarthy era. It’s astonishing to realize…
The plot of An Ideal Husband isn’t as absurd as that of Oscar Wilde’s best-known play, The Importance of Being Earnest — there’s no mention, for instance, of a baby in a carpet bag — but it’s still a featherweight thing. Husband concerns a politician, Sir Robert Chiltern, whose spotless…
