Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun originally opened on Broadway in 1959 — before the civil-rights movement found its full momentum and at a time when, as Hansberry said, “The intimacy of knowledge which the Negro may culturally have of white Americans does not exist in the reverse.” The…
I first heard Paul Robeson’s voice during the folk revival of the early 1960s, the days when Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were ascendant. Someone had put together a disc of folk songs from earlier in the century that included Robeson singing “Get on Board, Little Children.” It was an…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
If you want to put on a first-rate production, you need to start with a strong script. And given how many of these there are to choose from, I’ve no idea why so many half-baked plays — ancient, creaking comedies, pretentious contemporary effusions, dated musicals — get staged around here…
I was thrilled when I first heard that the Denver Center Theatre Company intended to present Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex with the powerful Bill Christ in the title role. It seemed a perfect marriage of text and actor. In fact, the company has deployed many of its strongest performers for this…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
During the intermission of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, I overheard some people talking in the lobby. They were trying to fit the play’s characters into the familiar Tennessee Williams oeuvre. Dorothea was like the self-deluded, fragile, alcoholic Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, they agreed. But who in…
Last year, director Israel Hicks commissioned Charles F. (OyamO) Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan, to write a play based on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Hicks wanted it set in a contemporary milieu, with Torvald transformed into the Nigerian ambassador to the United Nations. OmayO obliged. The…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Going to the theater alone is depressing, so part of my job as a reviewer involves coaxing, bribing and seducing friends and family members into accompanying me. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on these companions — wise and perspicacious people all — even when their opinions clash with…
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen is a play of ideas; I see them as white balls zigzagging through a bright white sky in a constant and dizzying display. The protagonists are Niels Bohr and his onetime student Werner Heisenberg — leaders among the group of scientists who transformed the world’s concept of…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
The Hunger Artists have made something of a tradition of staging a reading of James Joyce’s The Dead in the historic Byers-Evans House at the beginning of each new year, and it’s a good tradition. The story, subtle and beautifully multi-layered, filled with references to snow, memory and, as the…
Who is Silvia? What is she, That all our swains commend her? Holy, fair and wise is she; The heaven such grace did lend her, That she might admired be. Is she kind as she is fair? For beauty lives with kindness. Love doth to her eyes repair, To help…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always “Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
ENCORE Always…Patsy Cline. Always…Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Always…Patsy Cline. AlwaysPatsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of them…
Stop Kiss is about a slowly developing love affair between two women who don’t, at first, know they’re gay. Sara, an idealistic young teacher, has arrived in New York to take a job at an impoverished school in the Bronx. She comes to Callie’s apartment because the latter has offered…
The Country Dinner Playhouse confuses me. Just when I’ve got the place written off as old-fashioned and out of it, its operators come up with a really good show. Not just pretty good for dinner theater or “Well, at least the leads are talented, even if the supporting cast isn’t,”…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
