Alcoholism, journalism, communism, racism, Christian fundamentalism, tell-all autobiographies and the uses and abuses of plant food all surface as topics of debate in Sarah Fisher Lowe’s When the Wood Is Green, a world-premiere play that comprises Program Two of the Colorado Women Playwrights’ Festival. As if all of those subjects…
A few years before the entertainment business became the state religion, off-Broadway playwright Sam Shepard wrote Angel City, a surreal satire about Hollywood’s gangrenous grip on the American national character. A wicked and prescient take on the same industry that would eventually make Shepard into a bit of a celluloid…
Although this year’s Colorado Women Playwrights’ Festival explores unsettling and disturbing subjects, the first of two festival programs marks a significant improvement over last season’s feeble offerings. Despite a few logistical headaches (like starting a performance twenty minutes late, needlessly allowing a fifteen-minute intermission to run to half an hour…
The Morrison Theatre’s unflinching production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest starts the minute theatergoers enter the cozy town hall that serves as the community group’s performing space. As Lawrence Welk-like tunes play in the background, the patients and staff of a state mental institution mill about in the…
Much of the public discussion concerning the Columbine High School massacre has swirled about in a cauldron of controversy. The memorial service was too secular, too religious or too political. Howard Stern’s incendiary (and stupid) remarks were seen as emblematic of the media’s willingness to champion the right of free…
Midway through Act One of Kingdom, it becomes clear that Richard Hellensen’s play about a corrupt theme-park company is as much an indictment of popular taste as it is a rebuke of the soulless purveyors of mass-merchandised shlock. Bringing to mind the retrofitted, ultra-functional environment of the movie Brazil, the…
Guido Contini’s inability to separate his art from his personal life is what both tortures and inspires him–at least that’s what he maintains throughout the musical Nine. The brilliant Italian filmmaker freely admits that his insatiable appetite for women sometimes gives him more problems than a modern-day Casanova should be…
Oozing with oily arrogance, a cutthroat movie executive explains to a budding screenwriter that his script about two gay men dying of AIDS isn’t likely to play well in middle America. Like Tootsie and Terms of Endearment, he says, such fare can be difficult to sell even when it stars…
Despite an ominous, foreboding prologue, a powerful final scene and several impressive performances, Opera Colorado’s production of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet is plagued by the same sort of clumsy staging, static crowd scenes and uninspired acting that was so pervasive in the revamped organization’s recent, ham-handed production of Verdi’s Macbeth…
Many contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedies, such as Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, effectively use ancient myths to address modern problems. In fact, when it was first produced in 1944, the French dramatist’s modern-dress tale about a woman who defies her uncle’s edict outlawing the burial of her dead brother managed to…
“I may be eccentric,” Alma Winemiller tells the man she has always loved from afar, “but not so eccentric that I don’t have the ordinary human need for love.” A few moments later, John Buchanan Jr., who has known Alma since they were children in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, confesses that…
A black-and-white-striped uniform draping his stooped frame, a bespectacled prisoner wavers between capitulation and defiance as he impersonates Shylock in a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice that’s being presented before a group of concentration-camp guards. Trembling yet strangely calm, the frail Jewish man turns toward his Nazi captors…
If, like the ancient Greeks who started the world’s first dramatic festivals, you’re a firm believer in the healing power of art, then the musical Blood Brothers might serve as something of a cathartic experience in the aftermath of last week’s calamity at Columbine High School. Still, chances are that…
Playwrights have been turning the tables on their critics ever since Athenian dramatists parodied one another’s efforts 2,500 years ago. Whether being skewered by eighteenth-century British wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Critic), lampooned by contemporary dramatist–and former reviewer himself–Tom Stoppard (The Real Inspector Hound) or indirectly taken to task by…
When Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year debuted on Broadway in 1975, the play about a man and a woman who rendezvous once a year at a California inn was praised for its “genuinely funny” look at how attitudes toward marriage had changed between the Donna Reed era and the…
Far from being just a dirty family secret, incest is the supreme betrayal of familial trust. The unspeakable offense–which often suffocates both victim and perpetrator in a cloak of silent shame and sworn secrecy–invariably rears its ugly head from one generation to another until someone finds the courage, the will…
The problem with producing My Fair Lady is that (a) most audience members harbor fond memories of the 1964 film starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn; (b) most of those same theatergoers have already seen umpteen different stage versions that pale in comparison to their memories of the venerated film;…
Near the end of Josefina Lopez’s Real Women Have Curves, an aspiring young writer tells us that as she grew up, she wanted to teach her Chicana elders how to live a better, more liberated life. “But in their own way,” Anna says in retrospect of her mother’s friends and…
To dismiss Cervantes’s epic novel about the quintessential dreamer Don Quixote as an insubstantial story about chivalry is like saying that King Lear is just a grumpy old man’s four-hour rant. Or that Chekhov’s four comic masterpieces are simply boring talky dramas in which nothing ever really happens. And even…
Despite an encouraging beginning, several refreshing portrayals and a few side-splitting moments, the Mirror Image’s evening of three one-act plays starts to run out of steam after the second offering. That’s understandable, given that two and a half hours is about as long as most people are willing to watch…
Can a performing artist, whether it be legendary opera diva Maria Callas or veteran New York actress Gordana Rashovich, subjugate herself to a writer’s intent while imbuing his work with her own unforgettable charisma? Is it possible to be at once transparent and luminous, reflecting a dramatic composer’s fleeting brilliance…
Infused with more theatricality–and more songs–than any other play in the Shakespearean canon, yet lacking a plot substantial enough to undergird the work’s inlaid histrionics, The Tempest has for centuries fascinated, confounded and inspired directors charged with making sense of the Bard’s valedictory. At times a philosophical discourse about reality…
