The Denver Center Theatre Company’s Scapin or the Con Artist is such an intelligent, lively, tasteful production. Nagle Jackson’s translation of Molière zips along: It uses contemporary slang but doesn’t hit you over the head with desperate-to-be-relevant jokes. There are some hilarious rhythmic ping-pong bits and some amazing sequences of…
Terry Dodd’s First Night or Whatever was commissioned to be the first play performed in the Byron Theatre at the University of Denver’s new, multimillion-dollar Newman Center. It’s a fitting debut choice, because the play is all about theater itself. It takes place in a dressing room, where a cast…
Ruthless! The Musical utilizes themes, quotes and various bits and pieces from All About Eve, The Bad Seed, Gypsy and doubtless a zillion other plays and movies I didn’t recognize. “Sing out, Louise,” a teacher calls to a child performer; a devilish child offers her mother “a bucket of kisses”;…
I can’t tell you how uncomfortable I was watching Brooklyn: The Musical, and how embarrassed. Embarrassed at having to witness this inane, dishonest, derivative piece of work, embarrassed for the actors performing it, and embarrassed for the rest of the audience — most of which, however, was whooping and cheering…
It’s hard to fathom what the Holocaust means now, used for political leverage and simplified into totemic symbols that short-circuit thought. The Holocaust was the defining fact of my childhood and adolescence, but it wasn’t called the Holocaust then. It was the war. The war encompassed a lot of things:…
After twenty minutes or so of watching Relatively Speaking, I stopped taking notes and began laughing. Out loud and several times. This may not seem particularly significant, but consider the fact that as a critic, I go to the theater far more often than normal mortals do — which means…
It was a lover and his lass, With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, That o’er the green cornfield did pass In the spring time, the only pretty ring time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding: Sweet lovers love the spring. — From As…
I’m not much for American rural — slack-tongued accents, flat Coke, screen doors and heat, the heart-numbing sameness of daily life — and I tend to dislike dramas about dysfunctional families, especially when the dysfunction involves addiction or alcohol. I’ve yawned through I don’t know how many productions of Long…
Sure, we have one of the best jobs in the universe, but sometimes theater critics get tired. Tired of gut-wrenchingly deep performances and slick, practiced shallow ones. Of being blasted out of our seats by hyped-up sound systems, enduring pretentiously poetic prose, figuring out symbolism, trying to ignore a stilted…
It’s hard to know what there is left to say about the Holocaust. Or how one begins to evoke its horror on stage. The concentration camps have become iconic as the subject of countless memoirs, histories, artworks, films and television movies; they’re used to justify or condemn all kinds of…
Victor/Victoria, which made its first appearance in 1982 as a movie starring Robert Preston and Julie Andrews, was daring in its day. Set in 1930s Paris, it’s a mixture of sophistication and nostalgia, a gentle, funny exploration of sex roles told in songs and skits and held together by a…
Chekhov’s people are unhappy. Their unhappiness never rises to the level of tragedy, but it isn’t pathos, either. These characters are vague and muddled. They can’t think clearly about their own grief; they blame this and then that, latching onto explanatory catchphrases and repeating them. They complain, bicker and snap…
The music is nice, and the two actors play the piano amazingly well, but in all honesty, the Denver Center Theatre Company production of 2 Pianos, 4 Hands feels like pretty thin gruel. In a series of short, comic vignettes, it details the struggles of two youngsters bent on careers…
I first saw Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen in London a few years ago. I remember leaving the theater feeling light-headed and exhilarated by the play of ideas Frayn had started up: ideas about science and human nature, guilt and mutability, and about how, at the most essential level, we know what…
Bovine Metropolis Theater stands where the Changing Scene — whose hallmark was an intense vitality — stood for over three decades, until the turn of the century. The original owners of the Scene were New York dancers Al Brooks and Maxine Munt, who arrived in an almost art-free Denver and…
The choice of a journey often deserves a writer’s attention quite as much as the journey itself. Travel, like dreaming, is a form of emotional satisfaction, and though you may explain the act of dreaming by the cheese eaten at dinner, you cannot explain so easily the particular images which…
Facing a budget shortfall for the last production of his Shadow Theatre Company’s sixth season, artistic director Jeffrey Nickelson decided to make a virtue of necessity. He ditched expensive plans to stage The Old Settler and teamed with associate artistic director Hugo Jon Sayles to create Sweet Corner Symphony, a…
Comic Potential, now at the Aurora Fox, takes flight on the performance of Jessica Austgen as robot JCF 31333 — or Jacie Triplethree. Alan Ayckbourn’s play is set in the near future, when the entertainment industry has descended even further into chattering idiocy than it has today. In a third-rate…
I don’t know about you, but I worry when I read this kind of thing in the notes a theater provides about a playwright — in this case, Caridad Svich, in the program for Alchemy of Desire/Dead-man’s Blues: “Svich sees Alchemy/Blues as an ideal example of her visceral connection to…
I know times are tight, but this won’t do. Watching Saturday Night Fever at the Buell, it was hard to remember that the auditorium had hosted such scintillating musicals as Kiss Me Kate, Swing and The Full Monty in the past couple of years. Saturday Night Fever feels grubby and…
The violence wrought by the Manson family continues to hold our imagination. There’s something about the confluence of evil, pop culture (the best known of the group’s victims was beautiful blond movie star Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant) and the politics of the late ’60s that feeds our…
George Orwell’s reputation has been a little clouded of late. For decades after his death, he was seen as a kind of secular saint, a truth teller, a font of wisdom and decency whose writing brought desperately needed clarity to a murky world. But there were always grumblers, and the…
