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…
Habeas Corpus. Director Richard Pegg, who’s English, completely gets Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, a nutty sex farce set in Hove in the ’70s. Pegg knows that when it comes to sex, a certain kind of Englishman vacillates perennially between shame and lust. He also understands that Bennett’s ironic melancholia is…
Eventide is a sequel of sorts to Plainsong, which the Denver Center Theatre Company produced two years ago. Plainsong was a triumph, a perfect marriage of production values and novelist Kent Haruf’s words. A luminous and over-arching sky dominated the action, and Plainsong became less a story about individual people…
Truth is, I don’t like Eugene O’Neill’s work much, and I really loathe Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I’m not proud of this. I remember once reading another critic who insisted that Shakespeare was overrated and thinking this said far more about the critic than about Shakespeare. O’Neill is one…
Habeas Corpus. Director Richard Pegg, who’s English, completely gets Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, a nutty sex farce set in Hove in the ’70s. Pegg knows that when it comes to sex, a certain kind of Englishman vacillates perennially between shame and lust. He also understands that Bennett’s ironic melancholia is…
In a culture not much concerned with history, the Cold War that shaped American politics and thinking for so many decades has almost faded from memory, replaced by the misnamed War on Terror. But playwright Rogelio Martinez was born in Cuba, where Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin was a national hero,…
Habeas Corpus. Director Richard Pegg, who’s English, completely gets Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, a nutty sex farce set in Hove in the ’70s. Pegg knows that when it comes to sex, a certain kind of Englishman vacillates perennially between shame and lust. He also understands that Bennett’s ironic melancholia is…
The members of the Buntport Theater troupe have always been interested in the creative process. They’ve imagined Alexandre Dumas creating his three musketeers after reading a novel borrowed from the library; suggested what would happen if Ovid, having burned the manuscript of Metamorphoses in a fit of pique, came face…
Home by Dark. The events in Home by Dark, currently receiving its world premiere at Curious, are very close to local playwright Terry Dodd’s heart. When he was a student at the University of Colorado in the 1970s, he received a nighttime visit from his state trooper father. Dale Dodd…
There’s a pleasant straightforwardness to Sheldon Friedman’s The Long Goodbye, which begins with a gunshot, then an elderly man holding the gun and describing the slow process of his wife’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s. Moving back a little in time, you see this man, Parker, with his dazed and disoriented wheelchair-bound…
