Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s musical Next to Normal won the Pulitzer for its authors — the book and lyrics are by Yorkey, the music by Kitt. Yet it began simply as an exercise for a musical theater workshop, one of those “show us everything you’ve learned in 10 minutes”…
There aren’t enough opportunities for local playwrights to please Frank Oteri. It’s a shortage that drove Oteri to create A Very Dark Holiday Playwright Festivus at the Vintage Theatre, a showcase that spotlights work from six local writers. The show includes an original comedy from Oteri titled “Intimate Information,” a…
Hello, Dolly! You’re looking for a warm, lively, music-filled, sweetly sentimental holiday season show — but you’ve had it up to here with Santas and Tiny Tims, as well as not-so-funny take-offs on Santas and Tiny Tims. Say hello to Hello, Dolly!, an old warhorse finding new life at Boulder’s…
December holidays such as Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Solstice are forced to make their case to a bureaucrat intent on streamlining the calendar. Santa’s compulsive list-making may have far more sinister implications than most people realize. A festive dinner gets couples quarreling, while a young man fights his clock on…
When you share a bill with Gwenyth Paltrow on Conan O’Brien’s step-down-but-still-in-the-game TBS vehicle, you know you’ve sort of made it. Such was the case last night for T.J. Miller, the latest in an increasingly long line of semi-stars to come out of Denver’s East High School that also includes…
Like many art forms, the craft of standup comedy is, for the most part, a boys’ club. “We wanted to take back the night,” jokes participating comedian Alicia Jacobs of Ladies Laugh-in, a monthly comedy showcase happening tomorrow night at 8 p.m. at Beauty Bar. Started back in July by…
Dixie’s Tupperware Party. Dixie is a booze- and sex-addicted, trash-talking, child-neglecting ex-con from Alabama who holds Tupperware parties in her trailer, and she’s invited you to this one. Dixie’s Tupperware Party at the Galleria really is a Tupperware party — you get a name tag and raffle number when you…
Though I’ve managed to skip all Sugarplums, Scrooges and Child’s Christmases this year, I couldn’t avoid the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s A Christmas Carol. Director Philip C. Sneed’s readers’ theater approach — few actors, a cappella Christmas songs, minimal glitz, functional rather than exquisite sets and costumes — puts the focus…
Unless you count bandleader Natalia Perez del Villar’s festive red vest, there wasn’t too much Christmas-y about the tenuously Christmas-themed Navidad Flamenca at the Mercury Cafe on Friday night. Though the band played a few villancicos, or traditional Spanish Christmas songs, the jingling bells your typical North American might expect…
Dixie is a booze- and sex-addicted, trash-talking, child-neglecting ex-con from Alabama who holds Tupperware parties in her trailer, and she’s invited you to this one. Dixie’s Tupperware Party really is a Tupperware party — you get a name tag and raffle number when you walk into to the Garner Galleria…
Pamela Mencher has spent eleven years working on her play — but in some ways, she’s been working on it her whole life. Born on a Lakota/Sioux reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Mencher spent her formative years there and on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana during the civil rights…
Dixie Longate has come to Denver to ply her Tupper-wares (har) at the Garner Galleria Theatre. The show opened last week and will be here through early January, so there’s still plenty of time to go and reevaluate your tupperware needs. I went on Friday. Truly, it was ridiculous –…
Marguerite Endsley wants to spread the word about something near and dear to her heart: pole dancing. And in the process, she wants to raise some money for a fellow pole dancer who recently suffered a horrific accident: 32-year-old Debbie Plowman, a mother of two from England who fell on…
At most performances, a front row seat is the most desirable spot to be — aside from marking your status as the best person to shank and rob after the show, it’s also the best way to see the action. At a comedy show, though, it’s a little different. Much…
Astronomical Sunset. Jim is a man destroyed by guilt because a social-networking site he created led to…actually, it’s not quite clear what, but it had to do with a teenage boy posting compromising photographs of his girlfriend, and the boy is now in prison. The plot doesn’t make a whole…
You’re looking for a warm, lively, sweetly sentimental holiday-season show, but you’ve had it up to here with Santas and Tiny Tims, as well as would-be funny take-offs on Santas and Tiny Tims. Say hello to Hello, Dolly! Boulder’s Dinner Theatre director Michael Duran has a long history with Hello,…
The Handsome Little Devils’ efforts to bring old-fashioned Vaudevillian melodrama to theatergoers in New York City has caught the attention of town’s snootiest critics. Earlier this year, the local troupe took their “Squirm Burpee Circus” act out east after securing a spot at the New Victory Theater off-Broadway, and the…
Astronomical Sunset. Jim is a man destroyed by guilt because a social-networking site he created led to…actually, it’s not quite clear what, but it had to do with a teenage boy posting compromising photographs of his girlfriend, and the boy is now in prison. The plot doesn’t make a whole…
Rachel, a housewife, is having what she characterizes as “one of my euphoria attacks,” babbling ecstatically to her depressed husband, Tom, about snow, their two sons, festive television shows and how much she loves Christmas. He interrupts to tell her he’s taken out a contract on her life. We never…
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan tends to steal God’s thunder; as depicted, he’s much more interesting than the Creator. The same is true of the wickeder of the two main characters in local playwright Tracy Shaffer’s W(hole). The play, receiving its world premier at Paragon, concerns the twisted, symbiotic relationship…
Unless you’re a troglodyte who lives under a rock and hates freedom, you’ve seen A Christmas Carol. The play, the cartoon, the movie, the movie adapted from the play that is also a cartoon based on a true story — you know the storyline like the underside of your house-rock,…
Astronomical Sunset. Jim is a man destroyed by guilt because a social-networking site he created led to…actually, it’s not quite clear what, but it had to do with a teenage boy posting compromising photographs of his girlfriend, and the boy is now in prison. The plot doesn’t make a whole…
