Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
I’m not sure why director Lynne Collins chose to set her King Lear in the late nineteenth-century American West, since it doesn’t add much of anything to the theme or story. But it does very much fit the persona and acting style of John Hutton, who makes a fine, easy-talking,…
The premise of Steve Martin’s entirely ahistorical Picasso at the Lapin Agile is that Picasso and Einstein met at an artists’ hangout in Montmartre in 1904. The play that results is a meditation on the nature of creativity and the role of science and art in the twentieth century —…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
At the start, Hedwig and the Angry Inch seems like a hipper, wilder, more raucous and contemporary variation on a theme that’s been around since Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright in the ’60s: the loneliness and ultimate psychic disintegration of a gay diva. But the show soon sets…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
Dietrich & Chevalier. The Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier we all remember were artificial figures, carefully lit, costumed and photographed, their media images manipulated and protected. They were stunning in their glamour and originality, but meant entirely for the screen. For his play, Dietrich and Chevalier, Jerry Mayer has unearthed…
For the past two decades — ever since T.J. Mullin took over the space where William Oakley had been mounting melodramas — Heritage Square has produced some of this town’s most consistent entertainment. Over the years, Mullin and his actors have developed a style and approach all their own, producing…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed by the…
The Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier we remember were artificial figures, carefully lit, costumed and photographed, their media images manipulated and protected. They were stunning in their glamour and originality, but meant entirely for the screen. For his play Dietrich and Chevalier, Jerry Mayer unearthed some unexpected biographical data on…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Kids’ shows can be tedious. I associate them with low production values, broad acting styles and condescension toward their intended audience. But the folks at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre approach Peter Pan with such imagination, intelligence, respect and — above all — giddy exuberance that you can’t help enjoying yourself. I…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
You have to wonder at the sheer gutsiness of the Buntport Theater Company, whose members took an absurd idea and then — instead of playing around a bit, giggling and letting it go — decided to carry the concept forward, step by step, moment by moment, to its logical and…
Mouse in a Jar. George Orwell once said, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” and that pretty much captures the tone of Mouse in a Jar, an unrelenting chronicle of violence and suffering. Orwell was talking about totalitarianism,…
The legend of the man on the flying lawn chair sounds like an urban myth, but it just happens to be true. In 1982, an ordinary working guy named Larry Walters, obsessed with fantasies of flight, tied helium balloons to a lawn chair, equipped himself with filled water bottles for…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Rich in silence, sparing of words (and even those are sometimes unexpectedly ordinary, given the hushed and mysterious setting), The Sound of a Voice is based on Japanese folklore. An exploration of human love and loneliness — among other things — the play begins as a warrior comes to kill…
Chicago. Sort of Brechtian, sort of Cabaretish, Chicago tells a story of injustice and corruption, and tells it in the most seductive way, with witty, memorable songs, elegantly glistening dance sequences and a smart, cynical and grown-up script. Roxie Hart is an evil, self-serving little hoofer. Having murdered a man…
George Orwell once said, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” and that pretty much captures the tone of Mouse in a Jar, an unrelenting chronicle of violence and suffering. Orwell was talking about totalitarianism, and the play, with…
Chicago. Sort of Brechtian, sort of Cabaretish, Chicago tells a story of injustice and corruption, and tells it in the most seductive way, with witty, memorable songs, elegantly glistening dance sequences and a smart, cynical and grown-up script. Roxie Hart is an evil, self-serving little hoofer. Having murdered a man…
Perhaps in 1963, when Federico Fellini made his semi-autobiographical 8 ½, the movie on which the musical Nine is based, people cared more about a famous film director’s struggle to overcome creative block. Perhaps there was a slight thrill of voyeurism in speculating on Fellini’s relationships; perhaps, unlike Nine, the…
