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…
The musical version of Jan de Hartog’s Tony Award-winning play The Four Poster is called I Do! I Do!–and if it weren’t for two fine performers who pump their life’s breath into it at Littleton’s Town Hall Arts Center, it would be a resounding I Don’t. The songs are uniformly…
Only Stephen Sondheim or the devil could build an entire musical around a 35-year-old bachelor spending two and a half hours trying to decide whether he’s ready for marriage. Get over yourself, jackass. Come to think of it, apart from two or three sufferable songs in Sondheim’s Company, now playing…
Jules Feiffer’s Carnal Knowledge was written in the 1960s, made into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel in the 1970s, and revised in the late 1980s. It may seem a bit dated today–most educated men, after all, have learned a little something from the women’s movement. But Feiffer’s…
East German playwright Heiner Muller is not well-known in America, so the Lida Project’s production of HamletMachine presents a rare opportunity for Denver audiences to experience his wild woolliness. And what an experience: Such extravagant craziness is hardly ever this controlled and involving. The play is based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet–a…
A controversy over racial stereotypes has dogged the remounting of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat. But the art and soul of this 1927 musical remains the beautiful song “Ol’ Man River.” Sung by a character who is an ex-slave, it reflects both a protest against the subjugation…
It takes a little taste and a lot of guts to mount a 1920s or 1930s musical–and a keen artistic eye to keep it true to its period. The Country Dinner Playhouse’s vivacious 42nd Street is truer to that dazzling dance era than most. A pretender like One Foot on…
The dreams of youth can be so noble, so passionate and so hard to fulfill. Without a rigorous integrity and the warm watering of inspiration, noble ideals can dry and fade away, leaving very little behind but the stain of regret. English playwright Simon Gray’s astonishingly poignant drama The Common…
You can’t go wrong with the Gershwin boys. No matter how you stack their tunes, they still buzz after all these years. And they buzz best with a snazzy tap-dance routine to bolster them–like the bright numbers in My One and Only, a vulgarized revision of the 1927 film Funny…
Denver native Steven Dietz has had eighteen plays produced–several of which even made it to Denver (notably, God’s Country, The Lonely Planet and Trust). That distinguished career got another boost last week in Louisville, Kentucky, where Dietz’s new play, Private Eyes, received its premiere at the Humana Festival of New…
Playwright David Rabe savages Hollywood–particularly the Hollywood of television production–in his caustic Hurly Burly. And he doesn’t bother with the most visible life forms–stars, directors and writers. Instead he goes for the bottom-feeders, the little guys in the casting office who live off of mother Tube and feed off of…
The Denver Center Theatre Company presents a wild and woolly world premiere of One Foot on the Floor, a farce based on French playwright Georges Feydeau’s Le Dindon, and the results are mixed: plenty of laughs, but a slightly nasty taste left in the mouth when it’s all over. But…
The longest-running Broadway musical in history, A Chorus Line still has a few kicks left in its routine. Dated though it is, a bit slow of wit and just a tad sentimental, the show nevertheless gets at some tough truths and ends with a bang, not a whimper. The Broadway…
In a theater scene littered with satirical treatments of everything from Shakespeare to Russ Meyer films, there’s a new kidder in town. The Theatre Group’s The Kitten With a Whip Club Presents 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Valley of the Dolls is yet another outrageous showbiz parody. But though it’s all…
Clarence Day Jr.’s novel Life With Father, about his eccentric old dad and the close-knit family that revolved around him, made a delightful play and a wonderfully funny film (William Powell and Irene Dunne were a brilliant comic duo). Director Michael Curtiz’s impeccable timing in the 1947 movie is hard…
You may want to run home and brush your teeth after attending Steel Magnolias–all the sugar in playwright Robert Harling’s script is likely to encrust them. The play does have a few redeeming moments, some of which the production at the Aurora Fox manages to locate. But in the end,…
French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote The Lady of the Camellias as a tribute to a young lover he admired and lost when she died at the age of 22, burned out by high living and the scourge of the age, consumption. Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi kept the memory of the…
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and most self-help books about the battle of the sexes are written by space cadets. Since many of these tomes are also about what losers men are when it comes to their treatment of women, comedian Rob Becker took it upon himself…
Playwright Joan Ackermann makes sense out of the commonplace. In last summer’s biggest local hit, Stanton’s Garage, she wove the eccentricities of unremarkable men and women into a thoroughly involving slice of life. Zara Spook and Other Lures, also a journey of personal discovery, is a delightful fanfare for the…
In order to make the world safe for theater, children have to be initiated in its mysteries now. Everybody in the business knows this, and strides have been made on the local scene to create theater suitable for children and families–like the splendid Peter Pan presented by the Denver Center…
