Shouldering the tools of his trade, a gaunt figure walks on to the stage, opens his artist’s easel and begins to paint. He dons a hat emblazoned with burning candles that set his canvas aglow, while a backdrop reflects dual self-portraits of the man’s face. In this first moment of…
Plays about the theater have enjoyed a healthy success for at least 2,500 years, ever since Greek dramas were followed on the day’s bill of fare by comedies that made fun of the serious action preceding them. Somehow, audiences never tire of listening to the lamentations of people paid to…
A few years from now, an enterprising promoter is going to reap a considerable fortune repackaging the hits of, say, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Lyle Lovett. But the show won’t be sold to American audiences by sending it out on the usual concert circuit. Nor will it seize its target…
Something has happened to the experimental theater. Time was when an alternative-theater piece was certain to be as iconoclastic as it was entertaining–when performance pieces opposed in form and content to mainstream theater practices and conventions would draw an audience for both their novelty and their political and social commentaries,…
The hottest thing in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, now at the Acoma Center, are the performances. The crack cast assembled by Curious Productions is so at home on stage that it’s a privilege to watch it work. Under the savvy direction of Kathryn Maes, the four actors create a private,…
Think about it: Musicals are absurd. The minimal plots coast along on thin ice and then, suddenly, for no good reason, somebody erupts into song. The music is usually as thin as the plot line, and the characterizations are really about striking appropriate poses. Unless you’re talking about the achievements…
Playwright Tom Donaghy’s Minutes From the Blue Route offers a surprisingly tender, conciliatory look at a mildly dysfunctional family. And with its production of the piece, the Boulder Repertory Company has once again distinguished itself as a troupe capable of doing emotionally sophisticated work with quietly challenging material. The tensions…
Playwright David Mamet’s remarkable Speed-the-Plow is as true to the contemporary American cityscape as an Edward Hopper painting. Mamet’s tough-mouthed dialogue–always a series of interruptions and eruptions–falls with an intoxicating rhythm on the ear. His is the prose-poetry of the street, with its low-life hustlers, as well as the equally…
A new theater company has just arrived in Denver with a hot agenda and a cool style: Shadow Theatre Company is intent on bringing more plays by African-American playwrights to the boards. And if its first production, Innocent Thoughts, by William Downs, is any indication, we’re in for some exhilarating…
When Carlisle Floyd wrote the exquisite opera Susannah in the mid-1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was out hunting up commies under every rock and movie studio. It was a bleak, hysterical period–but it was nothing new. Witch-hunts crop up over and over again throughout history, changing form to suit every era…
Poor John Adams. Obnoxious and disliked, the lawyer from Massachusetts who prodded Thomas Jefferson to compose the Declaration of Independence just couldn’t get along with the other founding fathers. But irritating as he may have been, he was an American hero just the same. So Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone…
Exuberant musicals are the Country Dinner Playhouse’s stock-in-trade, though sometimes that exuberance can seem forced. The most recent show at the Playhouse, 42nd Street, was a terrific, bouncy re-creation of a 1930s extravaganza and the best thing the CDP had done in a long while. But its newest production, Fiddler…
The frailties of human nature were meat and drink to Moliere. His comedies live on because they so cleverly skewered hypocrisy, pretentiousness and ego-driven stupidity, and his sense of the absurd is just as relevant now as it ever was. This year the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is offering The Would-Be…
Capital punishment is on everybody’s mind these days, what with Timothy McVeigh’s conviction and JonBenet’s murderer still on the loose. So the regional premiere of Colorado playwright David Hall’s The Quality of Mercy is timely enough. And CityStage Ensemble’s biting production has much to offer–several fine performances, inventive direction by…
Playwright Tony Kushner took on an astounding feat when he wrote Angels in America. The six-and-a-half-hour play consists of two parts–“The Millennium Approaches,” in which everything begins to come undone, and “Perestroika,” in which all of the play’s conflicts are more or less resolved. It is so Big that it…
Chip Walton is one of the brightest young talents to crash the Denver theater scene in years. He’s an accomplished actor who made an elegant, riveting Salieri two years ago in the Aurora Fox’s Amadeus. But Walton’s special gift is for directing. He has a filmmaker’s split-second timing, a poet’s…
The best comedies are serious business. The whole spectrum of human frailty is meat and drink for the great comic writers, and it takes a profound intelligence to make us laugh at human beastliness. Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, a nineteenth-century Russian with a gift for satirical realism, was one such brain…
Theatre on Broadway’s Whoop Dee Doo! is a lot like a good fat-free dessert: Flavorful while you’re tasting it, but so light it doesn’t stay with you. This cheeky musical revue from the late Broadway costume designer Howard Crabtree is well-done–the performers sing and dance their hearts out–but in the…
It’s been a long wait, but the Roundfish Theatre Company is back, bold and brassy, with Bobology. These three short one-acts by Denver playwright James R. Cannon present an absurdist attack on economic, political and religious fascism. And though the plays have their weaknesses, the production values are high, the…
Family entertainment doesn’t have to mean mush. The Denver Center Theatre Company began the year with a smart, edgy Peter Pan and followed it with a poignant Christmas Carol, an inventive Comedy of Errors and a delightful Life With Father. Now the DCTC is finishing up the family-fare portion of…
Anyone who’s ever been to Christmas mass at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver knows that the church is what the theater wishes it were. It has drama, mystery, joy, a sense of the tragic, a joke or two and, at its best, a feeling of transcendence. Moving the church…
All that bastardization of African-American music by white rock-and-rollers produced some terrific stuff. But white pop music is pasty indeed compared to original rhythm-and-blues masters like Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. The rock musical A Brief History of White Music, in which a trio of black performers belts…
