Amateur Night at the Big Heart, a comedy/drama by Denver playwright and director Terry Dodd, first saw the light of day as a staged reading at the Denver Center Theatre Company 25 years ago.The following year, the play received its world premiere at the Arvada Center, directed by David Ogden…
Did you miss Chess at the Arvada Center? Now you have a second chance to see the production, which has moved to the Lone Tree Arts Center’s Main Stage Theater, where it opens tonight. In the meantime, here’s a reprise of Juliet Wittman’s review: The semi-operatic Chess doesn’t have a…
Novelist and playwright Michael Frayn is equally adept at comedy — his Noises Off may be the funniest and most intricately structured farce of the twentieth century — and high-minded, contemplative drama. In Copenhagen, for example, he has the ghosts of physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg reminiscing about a…
When I saw the reading of Lloyd Suh’s Great Wall Story at last year’s New Play Summit, I thought it smart and entertaining, a lighthearted take on some pretty serious topics, but with one specific problem: Suh’s depiction of an adolescent boy, who behaved in ways I couldn’t imagine any…
We’re not in Kansas anymore. Wicked took a classic villain of American folklore — the Wicked Witch of the West — and transformed her into Elphaba, a misunderstood victim, the prejudice against her and her green skin a clear parallel to racism. Even drenched in the saccharine coating of musical…
Denver’s comedy community despaired when heckler-ready Squire Lounge comedy night open-mike host Greg Baumhauer decided to call it quits. The comedy night was mean, it was ugly, it was the toughest crowd in town — if you could even get them to listen to you in the first place. But…
Getting a dance show off the ground in this economy can be a real circus, a delicate dance requiring high-flying financial acrobatics. Nancy Smith, the founder and artistic director of Frequent Flyers Productions, a Boulder-based aerial dance troupe, is uniquely qualified for the job. Last month Smith turned to Kickstarter.com…
Denver is no stranger to Wicked. The Broadway show has toured through here three times before, and April 11 marked the start of a fourth run in this city. Arguably, no one can celebrate the show’s return more than lead actor Andy Kelso, who plays the role of Fiyero, the…
Bravo! The theater department at Metropolitan State College of Denver has become the first college theater department in the state to gain accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Theatre. And not for just one of its programs, but all three: the BA in theater, the BFA in musical…
If life is a drag, why not play to the hilt? Since this is the second Wednesday of the month, Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret is presenting the Viva las Divas Art of Illusion Follies, hosted by female illusion artists (drag queens, in shorthand) Alexandra Winters and Harley Quinn and featuring a…
Glamorous Law School, a new musical written, directed and performed exclusively by University of Colorado Law School students, opens Thursday at the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder. So how glamorous can a musical about law school be? Glamorous enough to provide a brief respite from actual law-school life,…
Did you understand it? I couldn’t hear the words. They just kept yelling and yelling. — Overheard in the women’s bathroom after the play The semi-operatic Chess doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, and the music ebbs and surges continually like the sea — sometimes lyrical, witty or moving, and…
Many of George Bernard Shaw’s plays are extended arguments — moral, sociological, political — but the argumentation in Heartbreak House, while familiar, is diffuse. The play explores the decadence of the English upper classes in September 1916, just before the German zeppelins began their bombing sorties, with the extended family…
For hundreds of years, Christians all over the world have been telling the story of Jesus Christ’s life and death in the form of dramatic theater. From the devout actors in the Philippines using actual nails-through-the-hands, to Mel Gibson grossing $600 million portraying the bloodiest Jesus in Hollywood history, passion…
Storytelling is the oldest kind of theatre, and, perhaps, the most brazen. It denies audiences the comfort of distance. It embroils them in yarns about love, anger, fear and death; it invites them to abscond from worries, troubles, and boredoms. To storytellers like Irish-born Clare Muireann Murphy, who willfully, unapologetically…
There’s a reason I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change — a gently musical that we dubbed “pure peach souffle” over a decade ago — returned to the Garner Galleria Theatre earlier this year for a several-month run. It’s the perfect show for dating couples, professionals looking for after-work relaxation,…
The death of Trayvon Martin has thrust race relations back to the top of America’s list of conversation topics. But Carlos Heredia hopes for discourse that doesn’t just happen as a result of violence. He wrote and directed a musical that he hoped would help create it: Then Sean Met…
The National Theatre Conservatory — a training ground for young actors, and one of the jewels of the Denver Performing Arts Complex — is closing its doors after more than 25 years. As a parting gift, the last crop of graduating students will offer showcase performances of Fahrenheit 451, which…
There aren’t many actors around who can claim to have met Laurence Olivier, David Frost and Noel Coward — however briefly — or who still refer to Macbeth as Mackers, to ward off the curse associated with the play. But then, there aren’t many who bring to the stage the…
“April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.” — Sonnet XCVIII References to April — arguably the most literary month, if not the cruelest — abound in the works of Shakespeare. No one’s completely sure about the exact date of his birth, but records indicate he was baptized on…
Buntport Theater Company has always had a creative way with music: The ensemble’s choices for openings, accompaniment and intermissions are spot-on, and some of its shows have included fruitful collaborations with local musicians. So when two Buntporters spotted tough-guy movie star Tommy Lee Jones standing in line at the Santa…
The Slater family in Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw comprises three odd, bitter and unhappy people who nonetheless live in uneasy equilibrium until Becky Shaw enters their lives through the always-dangerous mechanism of a blind date. Suzanna is relatively sane but obsessed with horror movies; as the play opens, she’s mourning…
