Dan Hiester remembers the days when he dealt with exhaustion by sleeping round the clock after completing the run of each show. Then, somewhat rejuvenated by his two- or three-day slumber, he’d hurl himself into the next project. But soon after the artistic director of Denver’s CityStage Ensemble got the…
The truth-telling games and litany of deceptions that litter Conundrum State Productions’ version of The Maiden¹s Prayer might be tolerable if director Scott Gibson were to provide Nicky Silver’s play with an adequate staging. As it is, the two-act play languishes under a slew of problems, including vast passages of…
Poets are often harbingers of truth who rail about society’s ills from the relative safety of life’s cheap seats. They weather worldly rejection and familial contempt in the hope that something they say or do will better the human race. The knotted-up artistes at the epicenter of Craig Lucas’s Missing…
Mabel Tidings Bigelow has lived most of her ninety years contemplating her choices in life. The feisty Massachusetts salt aspired at an early age to be the first woman to swim the English Channel in the direction opposite to the one taken by Channel pioneer Gertrude Ederle (who swam the…
Cracking wise about this or that presidential candidate doesn’t seem so insulting in a country united in the belief that all politicians are laughingstocks. Unkind remarks about an artist of the moment, however, can have dire consequences in a society divided over aesthetic matters. Serge, Marc and Yvan have what…
What role does the artist play in a world that equates fame with ability? Are creative types required to defer to the paying public’s likes and dislikes? Or are they duty-bound to subvert and question convention, no matter what the cost? Despite some rough going early on, those questions ultimately…
When David Loper has trouble retrieving a crucial computer file for a valued client, he does what any office drone would — he decides to pull a hard copy of the file from the company’s central file room and fax it off as soon as possible. Shortly after he learns…
He’s produced some 65 Broadway shows, served as a boardmember and the American producer for Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and single-handedly changed Colorado’s cultural landscape by building the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Beginning this weekend, however, Donald R. Seawell, in conjunction with the RSC, will unveil what…
Fresh from a mid-morning rehearsal break, several members of Xpressions, a local troupe made up of youths between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, regroup at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Center’s tiny upstairs theater for a scheduled run-through of the play they’ve written together. After listening to a few encouraging…
When last we left The Kentucky Cycle, the ill-fated Rowen and Talbert clans were embroiled in the same sort of inbred conflict that nearly tore apart the nation during the Civil War. As Robert Schenkkan’s nine-play epic continues in Part Two, the descendents of both families wage a different kind…
The time commitment required to see all of The Kentucky Cycle shouldn’t deter area theatergoers from sampling Robert Schenkkan’s nine-play, six-hour epic (the first half, which includes five of the short plays, opened a few days ahead of Part Two, which will be reviewed in this space next week). The…
The raw emoting and whiny arguing that plague many experimental productions are, thankfully, in short supply in Lucifer Tonite, Denver playwright Don Becker’s scathing ode to the vexations of science, religion and various other weighty subjects. Propelled by Nils Kiehn’s tour-de-force turn as a raconteur-ish Satan, the two-hour work stimulates…
Plagued by divisions between working folks and the well-to-do, Germany, like much of the industrialized world in 1928, teeters on the brink of socioeconomic collapse. Seemingly oblivious to this pervasive gloom — or perhaps too aware of it — a steady parade of movers, shakers and edgy dream-chasers keeps the…
Actors who portray Shakespearean villains, heroes or clowns are sometimes tempted to overinflate the dialogue for epic effect or add tiny mannerisms to humanize larger-than-life characters. But neither approach, by itself, does dramatic justice to men and women who are part invention, part human, and whose needs, wants and desires…
That unfunny dramatic theorist Aristotle probably would have loathed the idea that the high point of the Central City Opera’s production of Dialogues of the Carmelites occurs in Act One, long before a proper “rising action” develops. Even so, audiences will undoubtedly appreciate the fact that mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle marvelously…
On the eve of an infamous assassination, several concerned Romans gather in their leader’s home to plan the next day’s doings. Like any cadre of revolutionaries, Brutus and his gang of nobles spend a great deal of time reassuring each other that the only way to preserve the body politic…
Smartly directed, honestly acted and imaginatively written, HorseChart Theatre Company’s production of O.T. takes on prickly issues with the kind of spunky tenacity that one expects from a group of theatrical renegades. Clay Nichols’s drama, which is being presented at the Denver Civic Theatre as part of HorseChart’s participation in…
Had Leonard Bernstein been regarded as a musical-theater genius a year or two before he wrote On the Town, the 1944 work might not have been cut to ribbons when it was made into a movie starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. Apparently unimpressed with all of the material in…
Aesthetics collide, myths explode and philosophies swirl about with dizzying delight in Candide. Just when the title character seems on the verge of articulating truths about the human condition, an unlikely catastrophe or comic accident spirits him to one of many far-off locales, where he contemplates life’s mysteries all over…
A corporate sponsor’s flattering comments and a University of Colorado official’s town-and-gown speechifying delayed the start of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s opening show by nearly 25 minutes. Shortly after the Boulder bureaucrats finished droning, however, audience members who had paid upwards of $40 apiece to see a professional-caliber production of…
More worldly wise than yesteryear’s bar-hoppers, yet every bit as desperate for companionship, the characters in I Love You, You¹re Perfect, Now Change long to secure intimacy without subjecting themselves to courtship’s absurdities. As these legions of swingers, loners and dreamers discover, though, there are reasons (including one or two…
Like any nation governed by an imperious busybody, the grassroots environs of Insectavia regularly buzz about with gossip and intrigue. The tiny duchy’s ant queen — who justifies her absolute authority by claiming to be the kingdom’s wisest inhabitant — has offered one-half of the treasury to any segmented, six-legged…
