There are two major threads in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. There’s the primary plot, in which Viola is shipwrecked in Illyria, decides to dress as a man and signs on as a servant to a local nobleman, Orsino, with whom she rapidly falls in love. But Orsino sends Viola off to…
Red opened last weekend at Curious Theatre Company. We’ll publish a full review in the next Westword — but Juliet Wittman was so impressed with the production, she provided this sneak preview: John Logan’s Red is a two-hander about painter Mark Rothko. The year is 1958, and he has been…
Sam Tallent gave up the daily grind four years ago to focus on comedy. A full-time comedian since that jump-off, Tallent co-founded the Fine Gentleman’s Club comedy troupe, a group that offers its Too Much Fun show every Wednesday night at the Deer Pile community space above City, O’ City…
Date. Some years ago, writer-actor Luciann Lajoie found herself alone and at loose ends, so she decided to try Internet dating. In Date, seated in what looks like a pretty bare apartment, empty chip bags on the table beside her laptop along with a fortifying bottle of wine, she takes…
The bar where Amateur Night at the Big Heart takes place is what sociologists call a “third place” — the first being home, for most people, and the second the workplace. A third place can be a pub, diner, coffee shop, library, post office or anywhere that people congregate and…
The Drowsy Chaperone. The role of the Man in the Chair is the spine for The Drowsy Chaperone, and the primary reason that this lighthearted, inconsequential and very silly show is so much fun to watch: Without him, it would just float off into the ether. But with him, we’re…
Some years ago, writer-actor Luciann Lajoie found herself alone and at loose ends, so she decided to try Internet dating. In Date, seated in what looks like a pretty bare apartment, wearing blue jeans with a hole in the knee, empty chip bags on the table beside her laptop along…
The Joy Luck Club, the new production at the Vintage Theatre’s new home, weaves a tapestry of relationships, memories and tragedies in its depiction of Chinese and Chinese-American women…
Banking on a “shuffle generation” that will listen to anything that’s good, Colorado Symphony Orchestra resident conductor Scott O’Neil is shooting to shuffle preconceptions of classical music tonight…and attract a new audience that will keep coming back for more. And so “Shuffle” features O’Neil’s favorite pieces that he says are…
The world needs more of what Amy Schumer has to offer: fresh, bold comedy that casually confronts sexuality and race in a way that makes you laugh now — and think about it later. Whether she’s discussing HPV, traveling to the Jewish homeland (Miami), or finally sleeping with her high…
Here are the stats: For the fifth year in a row, Briceson Ducharme, aka Ginger Sexton, has been in the running to be a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Now, as the show heads into its fifth season, Ms. Sexton is tossing her hat in the ring for the fifth…
The Drowsy Chaperone. The role of the Man in the Chair is the spine for The Drowsy Chaperone, and the primary reason that this lighthearted, inconsequential and very silly show is so much fun to watch: Without him, it would just float off into the ether. But with him, we’re…
Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. — Letter from Oscar Wilde to Lord…
Lin’s husband is scheduled for execution, but the electric chair in the big house is so rickety he can only be put to death if everyone in the Armadillo Acres Trailer Park where she lives conserves energy. So she’s urging them to keep the lights burning. Betty’s husband is already…
So it goes like this: Agoraphobic Jeannie can’t bear to leave her trailer in the Armadillo Acres Trailer Park Community since her son was kidnapped and her perm went sour. And on the eve of their twentieth anniversary, her husband and childhood sweetheart Norbert is suddenly head-over-heels for the stripper…
Tonight and tomorrow at the Mercury Cafe, V-Day Denver will stage readings from A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer, an anthology about violence against women co-edited by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues. This is only one of the events organized by V-Day Denver, this city’s…
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…
