The news at Country Dinner Playhouse is that Bill McHale — artistic director from the time the playhouse opened in 1970 until his premature retirement in 2000 — is back. Which means that after three years of lackluster productions, there’s a strong, vibrant show on stage. Sure, it’s that hoary…
All the sad young men, drifting through the town Drinking up the night, trying not to drown — “Ballad of All the Sad Young Men,” by Thomas J. Wolf Jr. and Frances Landesman William Inge’s Picnic so entirely typifies the ethos of the 1950s that it forces a director to…
In Blue/Orange, Christopher (Keith L. Hatten), a young black man, is awaiting his release from a London psychiatric hospital, where he’s been held for 28 days of observation. However, his psychiatrist, Bruce (Steven Cole Hughes), isn’t sure he’s ready to be discharged. He fears that Christopher is displaying all the…
We remember Oscar Wilde today primarily for his epigrammatic wit — the nineteenth-century bons mots that have lost none of their sharpness or humor over the intervening decades. This was a man whose last words were supposedly “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” Wilde’s theories of aesthetics, his faith…
I’ve never been a particular fan of John Denver, other than acknowledging that he wrote a few pleasant tunes. And despite decades living in Colorado, I’ve been pretty much immune to the myth of the West. My dreams are filled with cities — Prague, London, New York — rather than…
Underneath the Lintel is a seventy-minute one-act play that takes the form of a lecture by a buttoned-up, pedantic, spiritually timid Dutch ex-librarian. Peering into the audience at the very beginning, he lets us know that he’s disappointed by the turnout (despite the fact that the Aurora Fox theater is…
After ducking a little local controversy, the two-man Puppetry of the Penis is yanking in the Colorado crowds. Lincoln Davies and new-kid-on-the-jock Jef Benjamin are exposing their talents in the name of art. Once you get used to the terror of seeing two naked men and a seventeen-by-fourteen-foot Godzilla-sized phallus…
Simon Morley, the Aussie creator of the internationally notorious comedy Puppetry of the Penis, summed up his unlikely theatrical juggernaught with a smile and a shrug in one interview. “It’s art. It’s a piece of skin. It’s there to be laughed at. Get over it,” he said. Considering that Morley’s…
I would like to say things were otherwise, really I would. I would like to find all kinds of nuance and dozens of brilliantly esoteric references in the LIDA Project’s production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony. I’d like to have been titillated, frightened or inspired, because it is, after all,…
In Elevator, the first of Buntport Theater’s two original one-acts presented under the title Misc. , three people stand in an elevator, pretty much unmoving. We’re treated to several silent minutes, during which we study the actors’ expressions. A fourth person gets into the elevator, then gets off. There’s a…
Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America in 2001 partly as a response to President Clinton’s 1996 reorganization of welfare, which kicked recipients off the rolls if they had not gone to work after two years. Before doing research for the book, Ehrenreich already knew…
The strongest things in the Shadow Theatre Company’s ambitious production of Macbeth are Jeffrey Nickelson’s performance in the title role and the way director Buddy Butler deals with the supernatural elements. Macbeth’s witches always present a problem. They’re sometimes portrayed as wrinkled hags and sometimes as beautiful young women; sometimes…
Urinetown is set after a drought so severe that people no longer have private toilets; everyone must use run-down, unsanitary public amenities controlled by a monster corporation called Urine Good Company. Poor people pay more than they can afford for this privilege, and anyone trying to pee anywhere unauthorized suffers…
The Drawer Boy is a droll, humorous, slowly spun story that’s often gently charming. It’s based on a Canadian theater project carried out in 1972, when a group of actors from Toronto went to live in a farming community and created a play about their experiences there. You can catch…
It’s hard for me to review Suddenly Hope, currently playing at the New Denver Civic Theatre. On the evening I attended, the auditorium was filled with people who looked and sounded like my New York aunts and uncles or my cousins from Israel. Also, the musical celebrates a concept of…
Miners Alley is a brand-new theater company with a decade-long pedigree. After years in Morrison, artistic director Rick Bernstein recently moved the group to Golden, housing it in an intimate, brand-new theater above the Foss Drug Store. There, he mounted an interesting production of The Elephant Man last month. The…
Reaching for Comfort is, among other things, a study of dysfunction: dysfunctional birth families, dysfunction within marriage, a dysfunctional society. The play opens in 1980. John Lennon has been shot. Ronald Reagan is about to become president. We’re fully absorbed in the characters’ personal lives, but those lives are also…
Local playwright Melissa Lucero McCarl’s Painted Bread is a mixed bag. It’s full of passionate feeling, but I also found myself bored and restless for long stretches while watching it. Still, the ending was moving, and the patterns and colors of thought evoked by the play stayed with me. Painted…
The Paragon Theatre Company originally scheduled Michael Frayn’s Alphabetical Order as the last show of the 2002-’03 season. Instead, the company is showing a piece by David Sedaris and his sister, Amy, called The Book of Liz. I have no idea why Paragon’s plans changed, but as Hamlet so memorably…
Joel Fink has brought a strong directorial hand and some judicious cutting to Cymbeline. The result is a clean, clear, very watchable production. It’s hard to classify this play as comedy or tragedy, but a self-assured cast makes sure you know when to laugh, when to shiver in empathy and…
When Dario Fo won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997, it was a bit of a shock in many quarters. The Italian writer considers himself a jester, and his plays are cheerfully but powerfully anarchic. He mocks authority, turns officialdom on its ear, unearths unpopular truths and speaks consistently…
By and large, when you have a good cast you have a good production of Hamlet, and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s cast is very strong. Tony Marble gives an energetic, intelligent rendition of the title role; Hollis McCarthy is an interesting Gertrude. Tony Molina produces a convincingly power-hungry Claudius, and…
