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…
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…
The Rainmaker is a gentle, dated comedy, well-suited to the generally older audience of the Aurora Fox, but it has flickers of life. The play, written in the 1950s, is set in the drought-stricken West of the ’30s, where a family of bachelors — kindly, laid-back paterfamilias H.C. and his…
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…
Why is Iago so intent on destroying Othello? Iago himself gives two reasons: He’s been passed over for promotion, and he believes Othello has slept with Emilia, the wife whom Iago treats with brutal indifference. But the script leaves his true motive murky, and no one has ever come up…
Mariela in the Desert is a beautiful play, a serious piece about the way art works in the lives of the human beings who create it, the possibilities of transcendence it offers. The action unfolds slowly and quietly to the occasional sound of guitar strings — the original music is…
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…
I’ve had a soft spot for truckers ever since my hitchhiking hippie days: It was often trucks that stopped at the on-ramps of those teeming California highways, and they’d take you long, helpful distances. I remember a particularly fatherly trucker who wouldn’t let me pay for food when we stopped…
The Denver Center Theatre Company produced Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House three years ago, and though there were elements of the play I liked a lot, overall it didn’t work. There was something unfocused, arch and fey about the dialogue, and by the end the whole thing had dissolved into…
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…
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…
Pretty much everyone in this wambling, good-natured shaggy dog of a comedy is older than the character he or she portrays: Lazy layabout Royce appears about the same age as his mother, Marguerite; Ray Bud Jr. doesn’t look much younger than his supposed mother, Raynelle; and actress Pam Clifton thanks…
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…
Michael Hollinger, who graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, knows exactly what he’s writing about in Opus, the story of the fictive Lazara Quartet, a chamber music group as universally lauded as the Boulder-based Takacs, and his love of music gives this piece radiant life. As the play opens,…
The House of Yes is a smart, sharp black comedy — not particularly deep, but with some uneasy currents creeping beneath the surface. It’s an excellent pick for Equinox, which went largely under the radar with the three theater pieces it produced last year and is now looking for greater…
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…
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…
At the Denver Center Theatre Company’s New Play Summit last month, a couple of critics from larger cities were talking about our area’s theatrical offerings. On a Colorado visit some years back, they’d gone to Boulder’s Dinner Theatre — and the show was very good, one of them said with…
Eventide. This is a sequel of sorts to Plainsong, which the Denver Center Theatre Company produced two years ago, though the language is less evocative and the vision less far-reaching. In Plainsong, we learned of two elderly brothers, awkward bachelor cattlemen, who took in a pregnant teenager after her mother…
Every time I re-encounter him, I’m surprised and thrilled by Dylan Thomas’s writing – the inventiveness, effusiveness, humor, insight, sheer appetite and joy, as well as his intoxication with words. Under Milk Wood, described by the author as a play for voices, creates a day in the life of a…
