Nobody really expects a musical to have incisive dialogue, profound meaning or an interesting plot — though some of them do. But what a musical really can’t do without is music (clever lyrics help, too), and the stuff Carol Hall composed for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is, for…
It caused me to spend a restless night thinking about the apparently intractable problems of race relations in America, so I have to assume Spinning Into Butter succeeds as a play on some level. On the other hand, I found large chunks of playwright Rebecca Gilman’s dialogue intensely irritating –…
It’s hard to watch A Streetcar Named Desire as if you’d never seen it before and had harbored no mental image of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, had never heard anyone say, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” had never shuddered with mingled repulsion and fascination as…
In writing The Swan, a play about a swan who turns into a man, Elizabeth Egloff has mined fertile mythic territory. Zeus, of course, had a habit of taking on animal form when he was set on a sexual conquest. He became a swan in order — famously — to…
The relationship between literature and performance is a complex one. Theater can affirm the brilliance of a work of literature or (at least temporarily) destroy it, so that we leave a production of, say, Hamlet or Measure for Measure wondering guiltily if Shakespeare’s reputation hasn’t been…well…just a bit overblown. Fortunately,…
The touring production of Kiss Me, Kate at the Buell Theatre offers many pleasures, one of the foremost being Rachel York’s dazzling performance as Kate. The musical was first shown on Broadway in 1948. It’s a sexy romp, an assemblage of brilliant songs (the show represented Cole Porter’s triumphant return…
Oooohhhh! That’s the exclamation of disappointment from a woman standing behind me and applauding as the curtain closes, the house lights brighten and she realizes the ecstatically leaping, singing figures on the Arvada stage are irrevocably lost to her. Clearly, she’d have been happy to sway and clap along with…
Going to the Bug Theatre for The Santaland Diaries is like dropping in on a high-spirited Christmas party. People in Santa hats scurry about; every surface is crammed with toys and decorations. Pretty soon you find yourself singing along to “The Twelve Days of Christmas” while fellow guests mime the…
This version of Little Women — The Musical first played at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center three years ago, and it was voted best new musical by the Denver Drama Critics Circle. The show brings to life Louisa May Alcott’s beloved Civil War-era children’s book about the four March…
Conundrum State Productions, which claims to stage “theater for the discriminating audience member, as performed by the seriously unwell,” is presenting three short plays under the umbrella title Mortal Fools at the LIDA Project Theater. Each play contains something worthwhile — a fragment of insight, a snippet of surprise, a…
It seems every decade has its defining murders, and you can tell a lot about an age by which homicides grab national attention, how the press frames the crimes, and the ways the cases are disposed of by the courts. In the 1990s, it was O.J. Simpson’s alleged fatal slashing…
Making great old songs fresh again is one of the best contributions of contemporary musical theater. The Boulder Dinner Theatre’s production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes reminds us why, more than sixty years after their composition, songs such as “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “It’s De-lovely,” “You’re the…
I approached Two Women Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization: A Hormonal Cabaret with some trepidation. A few years back, it seemed all of the magazines and newspapers were full of commentary about menopause. Women bemoaned their hot flashes; experts prescribed various remedies, from meditation and soy to the universal use of estrogen…
Song, dance, dialogue, story, spectacle: These are the several pleasures of the American musical and, decade by decade, one or another of them moves into prominence. In the ’30s and ’40s, most musicals consisted of a string of comic or melodious songs, with whisper-thin plots holding them together. Then came…
Longtime married couples should attend the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Dinner With Friends, and so should young people in love. It’s a great date play. Not in the sense that it arouses desire or presents an idealized view of love, but because the playwright muses so knowingly on the topic…
Shakespeare’s Storms at the Buntport Theater reminds me of off-off-Broadway performances in New York City during the ’60s. It has the same funky, improvisational feel. Audience members — on the night I attended, there were about fifteen of us — sit in three rows in front of a wedge-shaped, stepped…
A Skull in Connemara opens with two people talking in a shabby cottage in Leenane, a village on Ireland’s bleak western coast. The two are Mick Dowd, played by Lawrence Hecht and the aged Mary Rafferty, given shuffling, mumbling life by Kathleen M. Brady. Dowd is a handyman, and one…
Apparently, controversy abounded when Contact won the Tony for best musical in the year 2000. The show has no original tunes (the music ranges from Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” to Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin”), and though the cast dances itself dizzy, it never bursts into song. Critics, however, were rapturous. They…
The setting is the home of a wealthy Jewish family in Atlanta in 1939. A brightly decorated Christmas tree stands in a corner. Though Adolph, the breadwinner and de facto paterfamilias (he’s actually brother, brother-in-law and uncle to the numerous family members who occupy the premises), has read in the…
Almost everyone has some idea what Edmond Rostand’s famed play Cyrano de Bergerac is about: a man with an enormous nose who, sure he can never win the woman he loves, selflessly woos her on behalf of a handsome, equally lovestruck compadre. The plot is so resonant, so filled with…
I suspect I’m in trouble when I’m told at the door that The Vow runs an hour and forty-five minutes without intermission. Is someone intending to put me through a transformational experience? I’m not very good at those. They tend to leave me helpless with laughter. Or are the creators…
George Bernard Shaw was an iconoclast and troublemaker. In his plays, moral and intellectual combat tend to replace action, but the dialogue is so brilliant that the results are engaging rather than static. Plot isn’t central, nor is strict continuity. In Mrs. Warren¹s Profession, a gun makes an appearance but…
