Circle Mirror Transformation. At a small-town community center, four people are participating in an acting workshop run by Marty, who combines a little knowledge of theater with quite a bit of new-agey yearning. The participants are Marty’s husband, one-time hippie James; sexy Theresa, who spent time in New York and…
There’s a lot going on in The Catch, a world premiere that grew out of a reading at last year’s New Play Festival. Ken Weitzman’s script presents a swirl of ideas — some of them fairly obvious, but all explored in interesting ways. Preeminent among them is the well-worn concept…
How perfect that Buntport is reviving Kafka on Ice — first produced in 2004, and one of my favorite of the company’s many inventive works — as part of a citywide celebration of all things Czech. First, because Franz Kafka is the Czech author best known in this country, with…
It’ll be a substantially less gay old time than previously anticipated at the Curious Theatre tomorrow: OUT @ Curious, the theater company’s tribute to the more festive segment of its audience that we told you about in the Night+Day section of this week’s print edition (still on the racks), has…
More than once during the Buntport Theater’s Kafka on Ice, the character of Franz Kafka (played by Josh Hartwell) comments on how stupid it is to stage an ice-capade revolving around his life and work. “It’s inappropriate!” he protests. As justification, toward the end of the play, another character offers…
For the last year, something’s been missing from the Lida Project. Certainly, it hasn’t been creativity or an open mind; under the energetic guidance of stand-in artistic director Julie Rada, the local experimental theater group in fact thrived as well as any small group of its kind can in Denver,…
With a name like the 24rd Triannual Intronational Dance Competition, absurdity was to be expected. And the event did not disappoint in the ridiculous department. The interpretive dance-off at the Mercury Cafe featured a juggling unicyclist, a girl in a bubble-wrap gown and many people unafraid to roll around on…
Comedian Hal Sparks will perform the first of five Denver shows tomorrow at Comedy Works South. Sparks, who has hosted Talk Soup and starred in Queer As Folk, has been focusing more lately on his stand-up career. His comedy special is available now through Showtime, he has a CD coming…
Hello, Dolly!Say hello to Hello, Dolly!, an old warhorse finding new life at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre. The musical tells the story of a meddlesome widow, Dolly Levi, who makes a living connecting people. Ostensibly trying to find a wife for half-millionaire feed-store owner Horace Vandergelder, she’s actually plotting to snare…
What a lark! What a plunge!” thinks Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as she steps exuberantly into her day, and that’s pretty much what I felt walking out of Curious Theatre after Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation. The play is just so sweet, smart, honest and touching, such an absolutely delightful…
Playwright Michele Lowe writes well about art, and the central character in her Map of Heaven is an artist, Lena, whose paintings are maps of imaginary places, and who’s about to have her first big show. As the play opens, she consults in her studio with longtime dealer and gallery…
I was surprised to discover that Jim Leonard’s The Diviners was written as recently as 1980. The play feels like a period piece, and not just because it’s set in the Depression. Buddy Layman, the central character, was brain-damaged by an almost-drowning at the age of four, during which his…
Bedroom Farce. Bedroom Farce is the story of four couples and three bedrooms. The oldest pair, Delia and Ernest, are looking forward to a pleasant dinner and a quiet night. But their plans are upended by Susannah, the intensely neurotic wife of their socially obtuse son, Trevor. The depredations of…
Come April, Boulder’s renowned Frequent Flyers Productions aerial dance troupe will stage The Fabulous Freaky Flyers and their Flying Machines, an up-in-the-air homage to the ’60s, at the Lakewood Cultural Center. But while you’re waiting, rabid baby boomers and retro-fanatics, the company is offering die-hards an opportunity to bid for…
Operation Babylift, which flew hundreds of babies out of Vietnam after the 1975 fall of Saigon for adoption in the United States, has faded from national memory. But for actor Joe Wandell, born Hai Tran Thai and the son of a Vietnamese woman and a GI, it remains the central…
There are so many seemingly random elements at play in the Yes! Lab’s concept for The Remake Rumble, a seven-week series that starts tonight, they could almost be variables in a long-form improv game. The basic idea: take the plot elements and characters from famous movies and remake them, improv…
The first act of Next to Normal is brilliant. As almost everyone surely knows by now, the subject is an unusual one for a musical: a woman’s long struggle with bipolar disorder. Mental illness is hard to dramatize. Most attempts degenerate into sob-sodden sagas about someone’s obsessive pill- and therapist-aided…
Bedroom Farce is the story of four couples and three bedrooms. The oldest pair, Delia and Ernest, are looking forward to a pleasant dinner and a quiet night. They chat peacefully about repairs to the roof, share a late-evening plate of pilchards on toast and cradle cups of bedtime cocoa…
Mare Trevathan exists in the local theater scene on many levels: She’s an actress, publicist and booster all rolled up into one dynamic ball of energy, who’s played roles for numerous companies, including Curious Theatre, where she also manages community affairs. Mare has been all over the world and has…
Bono recently took time out of his busy touring schedule to save his investment opportunity, Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark — a Broadway musical boasting tunes written by the investor himself, daredevil scenes of amazing acrobatics and, according to a November New York Times interview, “wows from the soul and…
After getting her start in the inner workings of the entertainment biz as a music promoter (for a while in Denver), Tig Notaro got an itch to be on stage — not as a musician, but as a comedian. In that respect, she’s been more successful than many; she’s done…
It’s been a rough couple of years for the Shadow Theatre Company. Not long after moving into what it calls a “state-of-the-art” space three years ago, founder Jeffrey Nickelson took ill; he died in early 2009. After that, it seems — from an operational standpoint, anyway — things got rough…
