Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…
Art. Art begins and ends with an all-white painting — or an empty canvas, depending on how you look at it. Serge, a wealthy dermatologist, has just invested 200,000 francs (about $40,000) in this painting, which features diagonal white lines on a white background. His friend, Marc, is appalled at…
Boulder’s Dinner Theatre changed hands last fall. It was sold by founder-director Ross Haley to local neurosurgeon Dr. Gene Bolles and his wife, Judy; they hired a new artistic director, Michael J. Duran — who, just coincidentally, starred in the BDT’s first-ever production 27 years ago. Which — just coincidentally…
Bat Boy: The Musical ends like a Shakespearean tragedy, with bodies dropping all over the stage, while horrified onlookers shudder and weep. It’s just that in Shakespeare, the bodies don’t rise up again to sing the finale. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the…
Art. Art begins and ends with an all-white painting — or an empty canvas, depending on how you look at it. Serge, a wealthy dermatologist, has just invested 200,000 francs (about $40,000) in this painting, which features diagonal white lines on a white background. His friend, Marc, is appalled at…
Yasmina Reza’s Art begins and ends with an all-white painting. Or an empty canvas, depending on how you look at it. Serge, a wealthy dermatologist, has just invested 200,000 francs (about $40,000) in the painting, which features diagonal white lines on a white background. His friend, Marc, is appalled at…
There’s no question: Larry Parr’s script for Hi-Hat Hattie is two-dimensional and sentimental, open to all the shortcomings of the form — a one-woman show that tells the story of a famed historical figure. You can be sure the subject will be prettied up, and any nastiness or meanness in…
Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage. Flaming Guns is a manic, farcical take on the myth of the West mixed with a large dollop of gothic horror. It’s also a genuinely clever, funny and outrageous script. Bits and pieces of things you’ve seen before float to the surface: scenes from…
Critic and scholar Vivian Mercier once described Waiting for Godot as “a play in which nothing happens. Twice.” I went to the Bug Theatre’s production of Godot with no particular expectations. The days when the play puzzled and infuriated the theater-going public, garnering equal parts derision and passionate support, are…
With Carlyle Brown’s The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show, Jeffrey Nickelson’s Shadow Theatre Company continues its mission of education and enlightenment. The play deals with a musical form that many of us would rather forget. According to a pre-show explanation by director Hugo Jon Sayles, minstrel shows did…
Cookin’ at the Cookery. Singer Alberta Hunter had an extraordinary life. She left her Memphis home at the age of twelve for Chicago, where she got her start at a rough club called Dago Frank’s. Eventually, she moved to New York City, becoming part of the Harlem Renaissance of the…
The Denver Repertory Theatre is a new company inhabiting an old railroad station hard by Denver’s light rail. It’s a terrific building that houses a collection of artists’ studios and boasts shining wood, interesting rooms and crannies, bits of antique furniture and odds and ends of art. In other words,…
Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage is a manic, farcical take on the myth of the West, mixed with a large dollop of gothic horror. Best of all, it’s a genuinely clever, funny and outrageous script. Bits and pieces of things you’ve seen before float to the surface — scenes…
Cookin’ at the Cookery. Singer Alberta Hunter had an extraordinary life. She left her Memphis home at the age of twelve for Chicago, where she got her start at a rough club called Dago Frank’s. Eventually, she moved to New York City, becoming part of the Harlem Renaissance of the…
Singer Alberta Hunter had an extraordinary life. At age twelve, she left her Memphis home for Chicago, where she got her start at a rough club called Dago Frank’s. She moved to New York City in the 1920s and became part of the Harlem Renaissance alongside such luminaries as Duke…
We go to a play by Harold Pinter with certain expectations. We expect ambiguity, eloquent silences, language used like a scalpel or to parody literary convention and ordinary use. There won’t be a plot, and the action will be puzzling, but it will involve mis- and non-communication between characters and…
Beast on the Moon. The year is 1921. Aram Tomasian, a survivor of the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks, is trying to make a life for himself in Milwaukee. He has bought himself a picture bride, a fifteen-year-old orphan called Seta. Aram is young, but rigid and traditional…
Claire Boothe Luce’s The Women was recently revived at the Roundabout Theatre in New York, a production I happened to catch one evening on television. It featured Cynthia Nixon, best known as Miranda in Sex and the City, as the wronged wife Mary Haines and Kristen Johnston as her catty…
John Brown’s Body isn’t exactly a play; it doesn’t have one absorbing plot line. Instead, it’s an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s famous 1928 epic poem about the Civil War, and, like all epics, it’s a kind of episodic tapestry. There’s chanting and singing. Actors are sometimes specific characters, and…
Beast on the Moon. The year is 1921. Aram Tomasian, a survivor of the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks, is trying to make a life for himself in Milwaukee. He has bought himself a picture bride, a fifteen-year-old orphan called Seta. Aram is young, but rigid and traditional…
The year is 1921. Aram Tomasian, a survivor of the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks, is trying to make a life for himself in Milwaukee. He has bought himself a picture bride, a fifteen-year-old orphan called Seta. Aram is young, but he’s rigid and traditional in his thinking,…
I enjoyed almost every moment of Visiting Mr. Green, but the title character’s Russian-style glass teacups disarmed me completely. During my teens, my Hungarian stepfather used to bring me tea with whiskey, lemon and honey in just such a cup whenever I was in bed with a cold. And the…
