The Taffetas are four singing sisters from Muncie, Indiana, beginning to experience their small level of fame: bus journeys to nearby towns, store openings, an award for “This Year’s Best Copy of a Copy” of a song. When we meet them, they’re in the New York studio of a show…
There’s a lot right about Bourbon at the Border, and it’s given a first-rate production by the Shadow Theatre Company, but ultimately the play is betrayed by didacticism and a weak ending. The evening is introduced by a young girl with a terrifying smile and an even more terrifying message:…
It’s hard to imagine Harold Pinter’s Betrayal being given a better production than the one currently at the Denver Center — an elegant set, excellent actors — but somehow, though I enjoyed the experience of watching it, in the final analysis, the play left me cold. Perhaps this was because…
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice began its life in London’s West End, as a play written by Jim Cartwright to showcase the amazing vocal talents of actress Jane Horrocks. Horrocks — best known to American audiences as the daffy Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous — has a knack for…
August Wilson’s Jitney is a capacious, large-minded, wordy, generous, emotional grab bag of a play that continues working on you for some time after you’ve seen it. In fact, more than one viewing would be required to plumb all of the work’s riches. The action takes place in a storefront…
The three plays that constitute the Morrison Theatre Company’s evening of one-acts, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, are based on a short-story collection of the same name by Evergreen resident Joanne Greenberg. Greenberg is the author of several works of fiction; her most famous novel, I Never Promised You a Rose…
There are two observations I can make about the Curious Theatre Company’s dark-themed farce, Fuddy Meers: I laughed out loud several times during the performance, but afterward, I couldn’t figure out the point. Claire (Ethelyn Friend), the play’s preternaturally chipper protagonist, wakes every morning to a world washed clean. She…
A man stands alone on the small square stage of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, a gun to his head — except that the gun is really his own hand. He tells us that he’s the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, that we in the audience are ghosts,…
In choosing to mount Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, the Trouble Clef Theatre Company has taken on a hugely ambitious project and, to a large extent, has succeeded with it. Written in the early 1980s, Sunday in the Park is a musical about art, its place in…
The central joke in the ’40s comedy Arsenic and Old Lace concerns spinster sisters Abby and Martha Brewster, who are pillars of the local church, much loved in their community, and always happy to provide soup for the sick and hospitality to the lonely. They live with their nephew, Teddy,…
Littleton’s Everyman Theatre Company is mounting a skilled and lovingly detailed production of a play that ultimately may not be worth the actors’ or the director’s time. The beautifully realized set is a young girl’s bedroom, with apple-green walls, shelves full of books and bric-a-brac, an Exercycle, a trio of…
Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure! — from a White Rose leaflet Germany’s White Rose movement served as a small, clear candle shining during a murky, terrifying time. Where did a group of students acquire the courage and independence of thought to…
In Spoon River Anthology, the unquiet dead of a fictional small town come back to speak. They are the characters imagined by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915; his free-verse anthology was later adapted for the stage by Charles Aidman and produced on Broadway in 1962. Today, Spoon River Anthology is…
The kettle had had the last of its solo performance. It persevered with undiminished ardour; but the Cricket took first fiddle and kept it. Good Heaven, how it chirped! Its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounded through the house, and seemed to twinkle in the outer darkness like a star. There…
The Theatre Group’s version of Cabaret is heavily influenced by Sam Mendes, the celebrated English director who revived the musical in New York a few years ago to a chorus of critical praise. That run still continues. It places more emphasis on the seedy viciousness of the milieu than either…
Brother Mine is a well-intentioned play that explores serious topics. Malcolm, the protagonist, is a young black man who was given up for adoption by his jazz-musician father and raised by a loving white family. He struggles with issues of identity and community, while his much-loved older brother, Anthony, has…
The Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Hamlet takes a while to jell — until after the intermission, in fact. There are good moments before that, but not enough of them; there are also moments bad enough to provoke giggles. Take the earliest scenes, in which the watchmen and Hamlet’s…
You have to like In Search of Eckstine: A Love Story: The cast is extraordinarily affable, personable and energetic, and the music is so seductive. That’s not to say, however, that this Shadow Theatre Company production is perfect. The script, by Jeffrey Nickelson and Hugo Jon Sayles, has its charm,…
There are weaknesses to the musical version of Mark Harelik’s play The Immigrant. The dialogue is sometimes flat-footed. The plot holds few surprises, and there’s no real arc to the action. The songs are uninspired, and one of the four castmembers has a voice more powerful than pleasant. As a…
Nobody really expects a musical to have incisive dialogue, profound meaning or an interesting plot — though some of them do. But what a musical really can’t do without is music (clever lyrics help, too), and the stuff Carol Hall composed for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is, for…
It caused me to spend a restless night thinking about the apparently intractable problems of race relations in America, so I have to assume Spinning Into Butter succeeds as a play on some level. On the other hand, I found large chunks of playwright Rebecca Gilman’s dialogue intensely irritating –…
It’s hard to watch A Streetcar Named Desire as if you’d never seen it before and had harbored no mental image of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, had never heard anyone say, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” had never shuddered with mingled repulsion and fascination as…
