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…
Bright Ideas. Bright Ideas is about a couple who will do anything to get their toddler into the best kindergarten in town. This could be a vacuous sitcom premise, but for the most part it’s attacked with savage humor, leavened by moments of dazed empathy. Genevra and Joshua were nice…
What keeps a man alive? He lives on others. He likes to taste them first, then eat them whole if he can Forgets that they’re supposed to be his brothers That he himself was ever called a man. — Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera Suzan-Lori Parks has set Fucking A…
Meshuggah Nuns is the kind of show that seems to have no real reason for being. It’s inoffensive and even amusing in spots, but it also feels like something created for the sole purpose of filling up time on stage. And in a world full of musicals with witty scripts…
Almost Heaven. Director Randal Myler has assembled a group of terrific musicians and a winning, uniformly strong cast. Each member brings a distinct and interesting sensibility to the music. The show is intelligently written and directed, and the production values are impeccable. A large screen at the back of the…
I arrived at A Streetcar Named Desire at the Denver Center with high expectations. Israel Hicks has directed almost all of August Wilson’s plays for this theater, mounting layered, pitch-perfect productions and, in the process, creating one of the finest acting ensembles you’ll find anywhere. When he proposed using the…
As Mercy of a Storm opens, an elegantly dressed middle-aged man is moving about a nautical-looking and rather cluttered place that turns out to be the pool house of a country club. Snow falls outside the window. It’s New Year’s Eve 1945, and the man is apparently preparing for a…
