With its just-announced 2013-’14 season, the Denver Center Theatre Company remains true to its mission of promoting interesting and exciting new playwrights. Four of the playwrights whose work received readings at the New Play Summit last month are included in the next lineup. See also: – Marcus Gardley debuts Black…
Fresh from filming his half-hour special for Comedy Central, Ben Kronberg returns to Denver this Friday for a show at the Oriental Theater, his first hometown performance in over a year. And that’s generating a lot of excitement in the local comedy community, which has been tickled by Kronberg since…
After twenty years, Ballet Nouveau Colorado has made the leap. The dance company is splitting in two, and the portion now known as Wonderbound has moved into Denver, to 1075 Park Avenue West — at the confluence of Arapahoe Square, Curtis Park and Five Points. Wonderbound is sharing the building…
Last Saturday night, tucked snugly in the middle of the Paramount Theatre for the Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Reunion Show, I found myself on the receiving end of some vitriolic crowd-work by Carolla, who called me an “asshole from some crunchy newspaper,” among other things, and berated me for…
Comedy Works South threw a pot roast Wednesday evening, luring in over 300 hungry patrons for a feast of second-hand smoke and light-hearted mockery. Hosted by the affable Chuck Roy, the lineup included Comedy Works owner Wende Curtis; such club veterans as Roger Rittenhouse, George McLure and Steve Mudflap McGrew,…
The stage is set up for a cozy Halloween party: autumn-leaf ornaments, joke skeletons on the walls, a red paper lantern. Six people are sitting around a table for a seance. But the table is situated over a graveyard, and pretty soon the participants’ bodies are taken over by ghosts…
Musician and multi-media artist Adam Stone has worked with Buntport Theater Company on four pieces over the last three years. He composed songs for three musicals, all of them among the company’s most exciting works: Seal. Stamp. Send. Bang, which gave hilarious new meaning to the term going postal; Jugged…
Interstate comedy tours have typically been the métier of famous names capable of drawing big crowds and veterans of the club circuit. Many obstacles stand in the way of aspiring comedians eager to earn their living on the road, from bookers who are unwilling to take a chance on an…
It’s official! With two — count them, two — Trekkie-filled, tomb-raiding, Spandex-clad parties behind its name, Bop Skizzum’s Nerd Prom is now an annual event. On Saturday night, hordes of heroes and heroines flew to the Summit Music Hall and shook both the capes and bodies their mama gave them…
Black History Month wouldn’t be complete without an installment of donnie l. betts’s Black Radio Days, the live radio show that picks up where the first nationwide African-American radio drama, produced in Chicago by Richard Durham more than sixty years ago, left off. That boundary-breaking program, Destination Freedom, dramatized the…
Regis University’s Concert for a Cause series is dishing up a whopper tonight, all in the name of the Eating Disorder Foundation, which will benefit from performances by more than twenty acts, including professionals and students alike. Organized by student Zoe Vlastos, a psychology major who turns about to be…
Chad Kultgen is the epitome of everything that is lewd in this world. His work is dirty, offensive and polarizing (see: The Average American Male). He makes a living transcribing explicit sexual fantasies with the women who frequent your local fitness center, and could give a rat’s ass about how…
Despite the deceptively fine weather, it isn’t spring yet. But somehow, leaving the theater after seeing The Seafarer, I couldn’t help feeling that it was. This had something to do with having seen four soul-stirring — and completely different — plays in a little over a month. There was James…
The set for the Denver Center’s Romeo and Juliet is austere. The play opens on a stage that is almost bare save for two coffins, the first on the thrust part of the stage, the second behind a transparent dividing curtain. Through the evening, most of the action will take…
Motherhood Out Loud. This play is performed by six actors — five women and a man — and consists of little playlets compiled by Susan Rose and Joan Stein on many aspects of motherhood: a new mother dealing with her own hovering mother, a woman raising an autistic son, and…
The word “robot” first appeared in the play Rossum’s Universal Robotsor R.U.R, written in the 1920s by Czech author Karel Capek. In it, a group of scientists create human-like creatures that ultimately rise against their makers. In the ensuing battle, human beings are wiped out and the formula for creating…
The Boulder theater scene has sprung to life lately, after several years when pretty much the only choice locals had were the — admittedly excellent but generally traditional — offerings of Boulder’s Dinner Theatre. Anyone wanting new or boundary-breaking works had to travel to Denver. But now new or newish…
Blithe Spirit doesn’t mean anything. It’s not a critique of upper-class society or an evocative exploration of the border between the living and the dead, despite all the ghostly goings-on. Even though Noel Coward wrote the play in 1941, when the bombs were dropping on London, there are no socio-political…
This Saturday, February 9, queens will be battling for the crown in the fourth annual Miss Queen of Aces pageant. One of the Colorado Gay Volleyball Association’s biggest fundraisers of the year, the competition isn’t just about beauty — it’s about serious talent, too. See also: – As Drag Machine’s…
Marcus Gardley, one of the five writers featured in this year’s New Play Summit, has received several honors and awards — including the PEN/Laura Pels award for Mid-Career Playwright — and has been widely produced. His Black Odyssey, an ambitious, large-cast production that most theaters would have trouble accommodating, was…
Here’s a play that creeps into your consciousness on little cat feet, so quiet and unassuming, so slow-moving at first, so indifferent to the flashier aspects of conflict and plot, and finally so emotionally absorbing that after you’ve seen it, you find yourself being visited as you drift off to…
Ed, Downloaded. Michael Mitnick’s Ed, Downloaded, which was commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre Company, had a reading at last year’s New Play Summit and is currently receiving its world premiere. It tells the story of a young man with a terminal illness who is engaged to an intellectual Englishwoman,…
