Angels in America: Part I: Millenium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
Starving through the leafless wood Trolls run scolding for their food; And the nightingale is dumb, And the angel will not come. Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain’s lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress. — from “Autumn Song,” by W. H. Auden So much…
Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden was published in 1964 as fiction, but in fact described the author’s own teenage struggle for sanity and the help she received from Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, herself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Dr. Fromm-Reichmann had strong theories about the practice of…
The Fourth Wall. Playwright A.R. Gurney is angry. He considers the Bush administration a disaster; he condemns its boneheaded policies, its indifference to the plight of the poor, its pre-emptive war on Iraq. But Gurney is a kind-spirited, bourgeois, WASP kind of guy, and in this play, his anger is…
Donovan Marley has been the artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company for twenty years, but this season — which just opened with John Patrick Shanley’s Dirty Story — is the last under his leadership. When he announced his pending departure last year, a seismic shiver went through the…
The parking lot is full, and cars line the curb on both sides of the street. Inside, people throng the lobby. A couple is being turned away at the front desk: “I’m sorry. We’re all sold out.” When I first visited this place a few years ago, there were seven…
Anything Goes. When the work of a knowing sophisticate like Cole Porter is staged at an old-fashioned venue like this, what it loses in nuance, it gains in good nature and high-octane — if sometimes mindless — energy. Not that there’s much nuance to Anything Goes. The show is a…
When Sue Leiser trudges across the stage and thumps onto a chair, she’s there. Really there. Solid. Present. Her face in a little moue of anger and disgust as she contemplates the malfunctioning of her bowels. The minute you see her enter in The Tale of the Allergist¹s Wife at…
Going to the Country Dinner Playhouse always feels like stepping back in time and into another America, the kind of place my in-laws would have recognized. They grew up on Colorado farmland, fell in love while they were in high school, even attended the kind of picnic dramatized in Oklahoma!,…
84, Charing Cross Road. A fascination with the life of old books provides a lot of the charm of this play, which is based on the correspondence between New York writer Helene Hanff and Frank Doel, a London bookseller. An anglophile and lover of literature, Hanff longed to see England…
Everything about The Chancellor’s Tale screams Quality Production. Pay Attention. Serious Topic. And, indeed, it’s a timely exploration of some of the issues currently tearing at the fabric of the Church: homosexuality, the Church’s responsibility for the poor, the struggle of priests to contain their own sexual drives. But the…
The auditorium at the University of Colorado is full of students for this performance of Company: The Musical. Not a parent or a professor in sight, no one who appears older than 25. I see a few young men wandering the aisles looking lost, couples seated quietly together, women with…
84, Charing Cross Road. A fascination with the life of old books provides a lot of the charm of this play, which is based on the correspondence between New York writer Helene Hanff and Frank Doel, a London bookseller. In the early letters, she simply inquired about out-of-print books and…
When musicals come to Denver, they often come without the A-list Actors’ Equity performers who made them successful in the first place. So we get the show that was lauded in London and New York, but with an inferior cast, and we’re left wondering why the critics were so impressed…
Playwright A.R. Gurney is angry. He considers the Bush administration a disaster; he condemns its boneheaded policies, its indifference to the plight of the poor, its preemptive war on Iraq. But Gurney is a kind-spirited, bourgeois, WASP kind of guy, and in The Fourth Wall, his anger is expressed through…
Cabaret. Cabaret is grim and distressing, and there’s not a hint of redemption anywhere in it. Quite the contrary. But this is a bloody good production, the kind of production that could attract all kinds of people who might never think of setting foot in a conventional dinner theater. Anyone…
The more I think about The Wall of Water, currently being produced by the Hunger Artists Theatre, the more I like it. Playwright Sherry Kramer is obviously a comic talent to watch. The script is farcical, swift and funny, but it touches on all kinds of major themes: madness and…
When I was a child growing up in London, someone gave me a large red book called Sunday, published in the 1880s. On the flyleaf was written “To little Nellie, from Papa.” The book had been created for Victorian children trapped in their dark, stifling houses for a full day…
Cabaret. Cabaret is grim and distressing, and there’s not a hint of redemption anywhere in it. Quite the contrary. But this is a bloody good production, the kind of production that could — and should — attract all kinds of people who might never think of setting foot in a…
At the beginning of Three Ways Home, currently being produced by the Shadow Theatre Company, Sharon, a white career woman, has volunteered at a social-services agency. She’s assigned to visit Dawn, an African-American welfare recipient suspected of abusing her four children. Sharon’s opening monologues are wittily incisive as she introduces…
Dalton Trumbo was a member of the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers whose careers were ruined during the McCarthy era because they stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee. After his bluntly hilarious non-cooperative session with the committee — re-enacted in Trumbo: Red, White & Blacklisted — Trumbo…
Cabaret. Cabaret is grim and distressing, and there’s not a hint of redemption anywhere in it. Quite the contrary. But this is a bloody good production, the kind of production that could attract all kinds of people who might never think of setting foot in a conventional dinner theater. Anyone,…
