All in the Timing. David Ives’s six one-acts are all about language, communication and understanding, and also chance and fate. The dialogue is light and funny and fizzy, and it gets your frontal lobes buzzing as you attempt to catch and process all the flying puns, allusions, jokes, rhythms and…
Modern Muse has kicked off its new season with All In the Timing, six one-acts by David Ives, a witty, sometimes brilliant word-spinner. The plays are all about language, communication and understanding, and also chance and fate. The dialogue is light and funny and fizzy, and it gets your frontal…
Sista’s and Storytellers. This is not a play, and it’s not exactly a cabaret act, either. It’s sort of a cross between a slumber party and a church service, as a group of women who sang together as children in a choir called the Heavenly Voices come together for a…
Before I saw Central City Opera’s The Saint of Bleecker Street, my knowledge of Gian Carlo Menotti was confined to the Christmas classic Amahl and the Night Visitors and his short ballet The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore, about a poet and the three mythical animals that represent different…
I was so impressed by Next Stage’s Assassins that in Westword’s 2007 Best of Denver issue, it was named Best Production of a Musical. The current revival features most of the same cast members, and Sondheim’s score — which takes on such American idioms as ballads, hymns, rock music and…
All’s Well That Ends Well. This play isn’t Shakespeare’s best: It lacks the usual poetry and insight, and the plot is highly problematic. Helena, one of those smart, resourceful, charming heroines we’ve seen in other Shakespearean comedies, is in love with Bertram, son of the Countess who raised her, but…
Urinetown, the Musical, the show about a world in which a money-grubbing corporation controls a population’s right to relieve itself by charging exorbitant fees, is not as odd and daring as it once seemed, but it remains highly entertaining, cleverly written and filled with witty, hummable songs in several styles,…
There’s a reason why All¹s Well That Ends Well is rarely performed: The play is far from Shakespeare’s best. For the most part, it lacks the usual poetry and insight, and the plot is highly problematic. Helena, one of those smart, resourceful, charming heroines we’ve seen in other Shakespearean comedies,…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Julius Caesar has some strong performances and interesting ideas, but it doesn’t hang together conceptually. The play itself is problematic. It begins with a focus on the uses and abuses of state power, as Julius Caesar, home from the wars, seems set to become…
The Central City Opera production of Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon, or Cinderella, is a visual feast. The costumes of Sara Jean Tosetti — who looks a little witchy herself in her playful program photo — combine charming empire lines with the crooked, cunning shapes we associate with fairy tales. From the…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
On one level, Who¹s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a very literate and sophisticated Jerry Springer show. George and Martha are a longtime married couple. He’s a history professor at a small New England college whose career is far less glittering than he’d once hoped it would be; she’s the…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
There’s a reason that La Traviata, an opera about the doomed love between a consumptive courtesan and an aristocrat, is one of the most frequently performed in the world: It’s gorgeous, packed with luscious songs and expressive arias, full of pulsating emotion. But Central City Opera’s La Traviata is a…
Threepenny Review editor Wendy Lesser once noted that our relationships with the dead are always changing — a comment that pulled me up short at the time. The dead are long past contributing to conversations with the living, I thought. But, of course, these conversations take place constantly, as our…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
Too Old to Be Loud is the sixth in Heritage Square Music Hall’s Loud series, and the cast does much the same thing every time. The very thin plot line always involves an annual reunion in the Boylan High School gym. Actor-director T. J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer play sister…
The weather decided to become a participant in the opening night of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s The Servant of Two Masters. To begin with, the performance had to be delayed for a half-hour because of pelting rain. Then, after a remarkably good-humored audience had been seated again, gusts of wind…
Around the World in 80 Days. The Victorians became increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in…
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival has been so thuddingly mediocre for so many years that I approached the opening night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream filled with skepticism. And nothing I heard at the gala preceding the performance — as new artistic director Philip C. Sneed pontificated on the history of…
The Victorians were increasingly fascinated with stories of adventure, as technological advances in travel made their world smaller and more accessible. It didn’t hurt that so much of that world map was colored an imperial red. In his famous novel Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne makes fun…
