Literally the biggest comedian working today, Ralphie May has been charming the pants off of comedy fans for the last decade and a half. Playing a slack-jawed wise-ass, May will often twist his audience’s perception by using a Southern accent to deliver an insightful crack about controversial subjects that would…
Trends in comedy come and go, but there’s something classic about Kevin O’Brien’s monthly Arguments and Grievances night. The simple twist of pitting local comics against one another for debates on inconsequential themes — which garnered a Best of Denver award this year from Westword — has been working for…
The best part of Electra Onion Eater, which opens Buntport Theater Company’s thirteenth season, comes at the beginning, when Erin Rollman stages a television show called Cooking With Electra and proves yet again that she’s one of the top comic actresses around. Poor Electra is aiming at Julia Child-style chumminess…
Over the years, there have been dozens of heart-tugging movies featuring a boy — usually lonely and outcast — and his dog. (Lonely little girls are equally attached to their pets, but they don’t get as much cinematic time.) Sylvia, now at the Lone Tree Arts Center, is about the…
99 Histories. In Julia Cho’s 99 Histories, a young woman returns to her Korean mother’s house. She is pregnant, alone, unsure what to do next. A onetime musical prodigy who stopped playing the violin when she was diagnosed with a never-fully-defined mental illness, she has broken up with Joe, the…
Rhonda Brown got the kind of reviews actors dream about for her work in last year’s one-woman play Red Hot Patriot: the Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, and the production won a Best of Denver 2013 award for Best Political Theater. Produced and directed by Brian Freeland, it sold out…
Last night a Daily Show report by comedian Jason Jones reported on high levels of apathy among Colorado voters. Looking at statistics as well as conducting interviews on Denver’s 16th Street Mall, Jones found that an overwhelming majority of people (80 percent) did not vote in last September’s recall election,…
“Blue collar comedy” is often viewed as synonymous with words like “dumb,” “cheap” and “Republican.” It was largely co-opted by Jeff Foxworthy’s low-brow comedy tour, and since then you really can’t discuss the humor that comes out of labor-work without everyone assuming you have a Support the Troops bumpersticker on…
Lucky 20 Productions is a three-year-old Denver theater company, and tonight, its members will debut The Travesty of Lear, an update to the classic Shakespearean story. Samantha McDermott, originally from New York, has been involved in theater her entire life. Along with her mother Jeri Franco, they started Lucky 20…
Just a scant few years ago, “horror musical” wasn’t a big thing. Sure, you had your Rocky Horror Picture Show and your Little Shop of Horrors, but beyond those campy classics, there wasn’t much love for fans of both murder and singing who wanted to see those two things brought…
For a while I try to figure out why I’m enjoying Rancho Mirage — currently having a rolling premiere at Curious Theatre Company and a couple of other companies nationally — so much. True, the dialogue is swift and clever — as Steven Dietz’s dialogue always is — and the…
With nine shows down and three more to go, Dave Chappelle has been running a comedy marathon this week at Comedy Works. With almost no promotion outside of the club’s e-mail list, tickets have been selling out in record time, and no matter how many extra shows are added (sometimes…
Geoffrey Kent’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the highlight of this past summer’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and now that the festival has just released its schedule for 2014, Kent is already mulling the production he’ll direct next year: The Tempest. “I thought we made some bold choices on Dream,” he…
Whenever someone lays the “I find that joke offensive” line on me, I always silently wonder: Do you really? Or do you just want people to know that you do? Nowhere does this happen more often than in comedy clubs, and it’s no surprise that comedians love to find and…
Sometimes having a kid can slow down a parent’s social life. Christine Winn ran into this problem when she became a mom, and she decided to do something about it. She wrote a play directed not just to mommies, but is accessible to everyone: The Mommy Rants. Winn is not…
With three female comedians, three Davids (Spade, Chappelle, Sedaris) and a whole lot of masked wrestlers on the schedule, November is shaping up to be a delightfully eclectic month for Denver comedy. We have secret shows from Comedy Works, a Scottish wunderkind and another performance on the budding Boulder standup…
Defending the Caveman. This is a low-key, low-budget one-man show, part standup comedy, part general nightclub act. Written by Rob Becker, the piece has been appearing in intimate venues around the country for several years. Becker was inspired by the comment he frequently heard from women that “men are assholes,”…
For those of us who don’t live in the immigrant world and interact with it only rarely and in routinized ways, the realities of immigrant life are hazy. Now and then a news story knifes through the haze: hundreds of workers deported seven years ago after raids at meat-packing plants…
In Julia Cho’s 99 Histories, a young woman returns to her Korean mother’s house. She is pregnant, alone, unsure what to do next. A onetime musical prodigy who stopped playing the violin when she was diagnosed with a never fully defined mental illness, she has broken up with Joe, the…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
“The New York Times calls it ‘You had me at Wes Anderson,'” say the credits of Saturday Night Live’s recent Wes Anderson horror-film parody, The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders. By assembling the usual suspects of every Anderson film (pastel aesthetics, mod soundtrack, Owen Wilson) while mocking the public’s appetite…
While the surge in popularity of the Denver comedy scene can be mostly attributed to the catalogue of top class talent in the city, a lot of that talent wouldn’t be reaching as wide an audience without Sexy Pizza’s Kayvan Khalatbari. The marijuana activist and Denver Relief MMJ dispensary founder…
