William Shakespeare was, above all else, a practical man. The sheer majesty of his verse notwithstanding, the Bard of Avon became the world’s greatest playwright because he told his versions of borrowed (some would say stolen) stories better than anyone else. Which is why those who would improve upon Shakespeare’s…
If you’ve always thought it takes an advanced college degree to understand and appreciate a play, El Centro Su Teatro’s charming production of When El Cucui Walks is precisely the play to convince you otherwise. Even though this two-hour-plus drama draws on Mexican myths and is performed in a mix…
The garish glow emanating from movies, television shows and interactive media has effectively dimmed the theater’s jewel in America. But rather than abandoning all hope and selling out to Hollywood, some dramatists are choosing to preserve theatrical traditions by writing plays that manipulate the electronic media. It’s an idea that…
When Georges Bizet’s Carmen premiered in 1875, Parisian audiences were outraged that the opera’s title character was a cigarette-smoking, overtly sexual woman who discarded her male lovers like picked flowers. The fact that the story ended with Carmen’s onstage murder only added to patrons’ contempt for the controversial work. Stung…
Environmental-theater designer Jerry Rojo once remarked that he regarded Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as the ultimate personal theatrical experience. Convinced that the play’s two main characters personified the conflicting forces of intellect and emotion, Rojo created a unique design for his production of the play: The maverick designer crafted individual cardboard…
Have you ever regaled a houseful of your friends with an evening’s worth of your special brand of witty banter? And did their approving laughter tempt you to take your “material” on stage as a stand-up comic? After all, that’s how Tim Allen, Bill Cosby and Roseanne headed down the…
Hoping to recruit the audience members of tomorrow, the Denver Center Theatre Company is increasingly on the lookout for plays that appeal to family audiences. In the latest installment of its Generation Series, the DCTC and director Nagle Jackson have combined theatrical spectacle with great literature in a new adaptation…
“What can you do with the love that you feel? Where can you take it?” asks an eighteen-year-old girl caught in an emotional tug-of-war in William Inge’s Picnic. When her mother replies, “I never found out,” the young woman makes a gut-wrenching decision that represented the breaking of new theatrical…
Denver legend has it that the great Billy Eckstine performed in several Five Points jazz clubs of yesteryear, bringing his silky-smooth baritone to such venues as the Rainbow Ballroom and the Rossonian. Piqued by the opportunity to make a local connection to Eckstine’s music, members of Denver’s Shadow Theatre Company…
Great playwrights have always attempted to illuminate broad human truths by writing about their own individual demons. Tennessee Williams is the classic American example: His plays consistently give voice to the strange psychoses of the Southern women–his mother and sister–who were significant in his life. Likewise, Ireland’s greatest living dramatist,…
When last we heard from famed G-man Eliot Ness, film star Kevin Costner was portraying the crimefighter in Brian DePalma’s flamboyant film The Untouchables, itself a knockoff of the 1950s television series starring Robert Stack. But DePalma’s tale of Ness’s outwitting and outgunning mobster Al Capone and company in Prohibition-era…
For the last thirty years, comedy writer Neil Simon has reigned as the king of America’s community-theater circuit, where his plays are a favorite choice of groups strapped for cash, talent and time. Amateur performers need only speak the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s lines clearly and distinctly in order to evoke…
Just when it appeared that the reputation of noted Christian apologist and children’s book author (The Chronicles of Narnia) C.S. Lewis might naturally diminish with the passing of time, British playwright William Nicholson rescued the prolific writer’s name from virtual oblivion with the play Shadowlands. The absorbing drama, which tells…
As murder mysteries go, the Country Dinner Playhouse staging of Agatha Christie’s The Hollow has much to recommend it. Bill McHale’s well-directed show features a stellar cast of veteran actors. What’s more, superb costumes from Nicole Hoof and a tasteful set by Craig Cline and Eric Lawrence create a feast…
Ask a professor of ancient history for an explanation of the architectural history of theaters, and he might tell you the large, circular dancing space that is the centerpiece of all Greek theaters took its inspiration from the threshing circles that Greek farmers have used for the last three millennia…
British playwright Harold Pinter once confessed that his ear for dialogue is something of an acquired talent: He gleans some of his material from conversations overheard in bars and restaurants. In that respect, he’s not much different from many other playwrights. However, what distinguishes Pinter from the horde of minutiae-obsessed…
The overwhelming success of the Broadway tap-dance extravaganza, Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk might disappoint, dismay or even shock some musical-theater purists: There’s no Fred Astaire clone as the show’s main character. Instead, the unorthodox musical offers us an abstraction–a solitary dancer known only as “‘da Beat”–as…
“Get yourself some puppets, put ’em on ice skates, and you’ll be a millionaire,” laments one character in the Avenue Theater’s interactive murder mystery Murder Most Fowl, a nine-year-old production that annually lampoons local celebrities and events. At a recent performance of the show, that line drew gentle laughter and…
Why does Denver need yet another theater company? What can a new group producing plays in a downtown storefront theater offer us that older, more established theaters aren’t already providing? People once asked those same questions about Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, formed during the Seventies by a handful of students…
Contemporary playwrights face the same nagging question each time they write a script: Should it be a comedy, a tragedy or a dogmatic disaster-documentary? The latter is mostly the accepted province of Hollywood, and the only form of tragedy that seems to bubble up to the surface these days is…
Last year 28 of America’s regional theaters presented A.R. Gurney’s comedy Sylvia, giving it the dubious distinction of being the most-produced play of the professional theater season apart from holiday regulars such as A Christmas Carol. There’s an obvious reason: Despite some of Gurney’s off-the-cuff remarks about politics, self-help gurus…
The violence that engulfed America shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy is well-documented. What isn’t as well known is that many churches responded to the unrest by pulling together in a unique and effective way. In order to heal the wounds of their…
