Stop Kiss is about a slowly developing love affair between two women who don’t, at first, know they’re gay. Sara, an idealistic young teacher, has arrived in New York to take a job at an impoverished school in the Bronx. She comes to Callie’s apartment because the latter has offered…
The Country Dinner Playhouse confuses me. Just when I’ve got the place written off as old-fashioned and out of it, its operators come up with a really good show. Not just pretty good for dinner theater or “Well, at least the leads are talented, even if the supporting cast isn’t,”…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
The conversion of Scrooge at the end of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol always delights, whether you’re reading about it or seeing it on a stage. I remember Alistair Sim in the iconic 1951 movie, capering around the room in his nightgown, startling the maid on the stairs by insisting…
Always…Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of them also a…
At the end of last month, Brian Freeland, whose LIDA Project has been a vital presence on the Denver theater scene for the past ten years, sent out a press release announcing that the group is leaving town. They had intended, he said, “to reinvent theatre as a vehicle for…
Boston Marriage. For the entire first act, Boston Marriage is pure enjoyment. It’s light and fast, and the language is dizzyingly clever and cleverly self-punctuating. The plot concerns two nineteenth-century women who live together in an arrangement termed a “Boston marriage.” One of them, Anna, has snared a rich lover…
You’re familiar, of course, with the old theatrical plot line in which the lead gets sick, the understudy is forced to go on in her place, and, after a hesitant start, the young woman wows the audience and becomes a star overnight. Something like that happened on the evening I…
The Shakers were a utopian, egalitarian religious group, originally an offshoot of the Quaker community in eighteenth-century England, whose adherents dedicated themselves to God by separating themselves from the world and giving up all worldly pleasures — including sex. Shakerism was brought to the United States by a young woman…
Beirut. In Alan Browne’s play, Beirut is the name given to New York’s East Village, where, in a futuristic dystopia, HIV-positive people are quarantined (the play doesn’t use the terms “AIDS” or “HIV,” but the references are clear). Outside of this area, the world has changed. Sex is forbidden on…
No one goes to see a play in a vacuum, so let me put the evening I attended Cats in context: It came at the end of a week spent alternately reading student papers (in my other life, I teach writing at CU) and conferencing with the authors of those…
Beirut. In Alan Browne’s play, Beirut is the name given to New York’s East Village, where, in a futuristic dystopia, HIV-positive people are quarantined (the play doesn’t use the terms “AIDS” or “HIV,” but the references are clear). Outside of this area, the world has changed. Sex is forbidden on…
These are brilliant songs. They’re wonderfully performed at the Theatre Cafe by four singers and three musicians. And that’s all you need for an evening of pleasure and insight — along with a glass of wine, a table with a white cloth, and a single red rose for your hair…
Beirut. In Alan Browne’s play, Beirut is the name given to New York’s East Village, where, in a futuristic dystopia, HIV-positive people are quarantined (the play doesn’t use the terms “AIDS” or “HIV,” but the references are clear). Outside of this area, the world has changed. Sex is forbidden on…
Let’s start with the obvious: It embarrasses me to see a naked guy on stage. Not when he’s standing motionless, bathed in golden light and looking like a statue of Apollo, but when he’s wandering around a cluttered, filthy-looking room, spooning food out of a can with his fingers or…
These days, I can’t watch a Sam Shepard play without having my brain thronged with ghosts of Shepard viewings past. So as Chasm View’s Fool for Love unfurled in front of me, I found myself clicking off the expected elements in my head. A cheap motel room. Check. Somewhere in…
Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
For the entire first act, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Boston Marriage is pure enjoyment. It’s light and fast, and the language is dizzying — clever and cleverly self-punctuating. The plot concerns two nineteenth- century women who live together in an arrangement termed a “Boston marriage.” Some such arrangements were…
Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home begins as a tart-tender look at an overworked topic — the way family dynamics become exacerbated, for good or ill, at Christmas time — and ends up floundering in sentimentality. The play’s defining feature, the thing that should have lifted it from the…
Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
Nagle Jackson is an intensely visual director. For the Denver Center Theatre Company’s The Misanthrope, he utilized the talents of set designer Vicki Smith, lighting designer Peter Maradudin and costumer Andrew V. Yelusich, and the production is flat-out gorgeous. The set is simple and elegant: white alternating with panels of…
No question, the Angel at the center of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a tricky creature — neither divine nor malevolent, sometimes comical, highly sexual. She’s not any old angel, either, but the angel of America, which accounts for the frequent stuttered iteration of the first-person pronoun: “I. I…
