A Midsummer Night¹s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most successful plays, weaving together not only several plot strands, but disparate worlds: human and fairy, courtier and tradesman, Hellenic and Elizabethan. It’s magical, funny, good-humored with only the smallest trace of melancholy, and filled with sublime poetry. But it also appears…
This one’s easy to review: Just go see it. Oh, you want reasons — and I guess my editor needs a few more words. So here goes. From our first glimpse of the chorines in their glittery costumes and huge headdresses, we know that the Arvada Center’s Crazy for You…
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. — John Milton, Paradise Lost In Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, the mind — famously — gets a little help from other people. A man and two women find themselves trapped after…
Along with The Mikado, Pirates of Penzance is probably one of the silliest, happiest and best of Gilbert and Sullivan’s brilliant oeuvre, full of nonsense and punning, spilling over with gorgeous music. The story concerns a young man named Frederic, who, having been mistakenly apprenticed to a band of pirates…
First performed in 1947, Brigadoon was the earliest major musical hit for Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, the team that went on to create Camelot and My Fair Lady. Though the libretto for Brigadoon is slight and sentimental, the show is filled with wonderful songs — some as…
With Macbeth, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival company has accomplished something close to impossible: It has enabled us to see one of the great tragedies afresh. You attend a Shakespeare play with certain expectations. There are scenes that move you every time you see them, such as Shylock leaving the courtroom…
A talented young tapper makes it all the way from Wyoming to New York’s Carnegie Hall, but thanks to the malfeasance of a New York Times critic, his performance is a disaster. (“More stumble than silk,” sneers the reviewer the next day. “More slip than slide.”) From here, Thaddeus Phillips,…
For its production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, Roundfish Theatre Company has taken over an art gallery set in the middle of a desolate Denver block, with painted brick walls, odd found objects dangling from the ceiling, and scribbly artworks. The place smells faintly of mouse droppings, and every so often…
What is there to say about the organization that reinvented the circus, losing the kitsch and keeping the razzle-dazzle, removing tormented performing animals and substituting the extraordinary potential of the human body, giving us clowns with intellect and soul instead of rubber-nosed horn honkers in tiny cars? If you’ve seen…
As you enter Germinal Stage Denver, you’re greeted in the lobby by Bill and Betty — you know they’re Bill and Betty because their name tags say so. Once you’re comfortably seated, they take the stage to welcome you. They explain with great excitement that Jason and Medea are about…
When Pigs Fly harks back to the days when gay theater was mostly an unabashed celebration of the gay lifestyle and the joys of being out. In the 1960s, Robert Patrick — who later wrote the acclaimed Kennedy’s Children — was putting on exuberant skits, shows and revues in tiny…
I have been hugely resistant to Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-winning play, Wit. I sat dry-eyed during the last moments of the Denver Center production last year as sniffling, Kleenex fumbling and stifled sobs broke out all around me. I was mildly seduced by the recent HBO version starring Emma Thompson, but…
Promethean Theatre deserves a lot of credit for tackling Cymbeline. Despite moments of humor, insight and beauty, it is, in terms of plot, one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays. It’s as if he’d taken bits and pieces of action from half his other works — Othello’s jealousy, the parent-doomed love…
From the moment you enter the LIDA Project’s theater space, your attention is focused on the set: a large square of earth that dwarfs the seats surrounding it on all four sides. Clearly representing a city lot, it reminded me of the bomb sites found all over London when I…
As we streamed out of the theater at the end of Pierre, I overheard a fellow audience member trying to analyze what he’d seen. “Perhaps Shakespeare run amok,” he mused. It’s as good a description as any. Especially if you add Dickens run amok, the pastoral impulse run amok, Hogarth…well,…
Measured Ends takes us on a playful feminist romp through several Shakespeare plays. In the playwright’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the heroine, Helena, wins her reluctant husband, Bertram, by using an old folk-tale standby, the “bed trick.” Already married to Bertram — though the marriage remains unconsummated — Helena…
Oh, what can ail thee, knight at arms,Alone and palely loitering The sedge is withered from the lake And no birds sing… I met a lady in the meads. Full beautiful–a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. — from “La Belle…
You’re not just going out for an evening’s amusement when you attend Dearly Departed at the Avenue Theater; you’re participating in a prolonged goodbye to a Denver institution. John Ashton, the impresario who kept things hopping at the Avenue through twelve successful years, is closing up shop. The owners of…
Alan Bennett is the most English of English playwrights. Despite a steady output of quietly brilliant scripts and plays, he was for many years the least-known member of the original 1960s Beyond the Fringe group, which included Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. In the early ’90s, Bennett gained…
If Rattlebrain is a fair example, Denver-area comedy clubs have come a long way since the days when shows consisted of a succession of middle-aged guys wearing large turquoise jewelry and performing sexist monologues. The Rattlebrain Theater Company has taken over the basement of the venerable D&F clock tower on…
The best part of The Lion King is the first five or ten minutes. A solitary singer stands on stage: a brightly patched, wise-woman/jester figure. She turns out to be Rafiki, the baboon. Her song is full-throated and joyous, and it’s soon joined by other voices and rhythmic drumming. Animals…
Ruth Steiner, an author so renowned that she gets called on to testify in front of congressional committees that discuss funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, is yelling from the window of her Greenwich Village apartment to someone on the sidewalk below. We know from her muttering and…
