Gospel, the musical form that arose at the turn of the century with Pentecostal revivalism in African-American churches, has had a lasting and profound effect on American music during its century-long evolution. While rhythm and blues and soul took off from gospel roots, gospel itself has retained its identity and…
Musicals seem to be the one theatrical form in which outright silliness is not only acceptable but desirable. A farce has to have some underlying intelligence, some razor-sharp insight into manners and mores, in order to satisfy. But a musical needs only vivid tunes, lively dancing, sympathetic characters and perhaps…
Much of what makes us laugh in comedy arises out of pain. And Dale Stewart’s subversive, poignant comedy Harvey’s Boy is sore all over. However, there’s nothing morbid or crass about this one-man show. Stewart’s reminiscences about his childhood and young adulthood add up in the end to a warm…
The archetypal story of Beauty and the Beast has taken many, many forms in practically every culture of the world. The most common of these involves a beautiful woman falling in love with a prince who has been hexed into ugliness. In other forms of the story, the Beast figure…
Part myth-making, part absurdist exercise, part political allegory and part youthful hell-raising, The Eclipse of Lawry, by Gwylym Cano, is fun, stimulating theater. It’s hard to follow some of the dialogue, since the repartee rips rather fast and is complicated by a Texas drawl meant to underscore the cowboy theme…
Anthony Zerbe is one terrific character actor. He has appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows, as villains or good guys, disappearing into his roles and yet always remaining distinctly himself. I remember seeing his remarkable Richard III at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, and it has…
A whole section of seats has been removed at the Theatre at Jack’s to make way for the Civil War as only American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce could envision it–and as only CityStage Ensemble would stage it. Bitten by a Snake is creator/director Laura Cuetara’s compilation of five Bierce…
It’s the music that matters most in Appalachian Strings. But the vibrant production now at the Denver Center Theatre Company is also a history, both of “hillbilly” music and of the people of Appalachia. The writing in this engaging piece is sometimes a trifle overwrought, the people idealized beyond the…
There may be more people on stage than in the audience, but the crowded space in the small Dorie Theatre is alive with ferocious goofiness in The Madwoman of Chaillot. Dated and simplistic as Jean Giraudoux’s 1945 tale may be, it still carries the moral force of a great old…
And now for some socially redeeming theater: Ojibwa Indian poet and playwright Tomson Highway’s poignant contemporary exploration of Native American life, The Rez Sisters, at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Center. Once in a while a play comes along that opens a window into another world–then moves through the window and…
Film critics used to grouse about how stage plays never really transfer well to the screen–at least until Kenneth Branagh started transforming Shakespeare into cinema. And yet a well-written play provides smart dialogue, even when the setting is too confined for the big screen. Far, far worse than turning a…
“Two planks and a passion” is how Christopher Selbie describes the kind of theater he believes in–theater that emphasizes the art of acting, the imagination of the actor, and the imagination of the viewer. Four years ago Selbie formed the Compass Theatre Company with a few friends and a measly…
We’ve had a lot of little devils hoofing it on the Denver boards recently–Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Lucifer Tonite and the Jerry Lewis rendition of Damn Yankees have come and gone from local theaters since December. Beethoven’s devil was a sophisticated shape-shifter who never succeeded in seducing Beethoven into mediocrity. The…
Movies about parenthood tend to exaggerate the icky-diaper issues. Over the last few years, a new emphasis on Dad’s role in a baby’s life have produced a slew of sentimental foolishness like Look Who’s Talking, Three Men and a Baby, Junior and the insufferable Nine Months. But it’s not as…
A terrific set and wonderful lighting design help set the mood in the Arvada Center’s Jungalbook, a worthy adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling children’s story. In a mysterious green jungle somewhere in India, a little man-cub is born and abandoned only to be retrieved by a stately panther and reared…
Men are incapable of fidelity, integrity or profound affection–and they’re shallow to boot. Frantic for validation, women backstab each other over worthless guys, dump and are dumped over the slightest cause and would be better off learning to make their careers more important than their relationships. Sound familiar? Romantic love…
If only Sam Shepard had never gone to Hollywood. He was such an amazing playwright before fame, fortune and Jessica Lange got ahold of him. Why area theater companies don’t produce his early plays more often is a mystery; they’re beautiful, weird and perceptive, and they offer actors plenty of…
Bertolt Brecht remains one of the few great geniuses of twentieth-century theater. Marxist didacticism notwithstanding, his best plays set up contradictions upon contradictions that shake us awake and require us to think poetically. Because finally, it is Brecht’s poetry more than his politics that penetrates through to truths about the…
Rootless youth trying to figure it all out, angry young men and women, bright, soulful and lost–it may sound very Rebel Without a Cause, but Eric Bogosian’s subUrbia at the Theatre on Broadway is wholly contemporary. From the marvelous graffiti art decorating the set to the Rollerblades on Buff’s energetic…
The Thirties produced great Hollywood comedies and a few equally dazzling Broadway offerings–sophisticated yet crazed, darkly perceptive about human frailty, and often politically subversive (all the best comedy is subversive in one way or another). The Marx Brothers, Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, W.C. Fields, Noel Coward, Ben Hecht and so…
Big hair, ponytails and full skirts with bobby socks may sound like the Fifties, but the bubblegum in Suds has a definite Sixties flavor. The compilation musical at the Vogue Theatre is one of those nostalgia trips meant to tickle the boomers–and their grown-up babies who grew up hearing replays…
The young always accuse the previous generation of screwing up the world–and very often for good reason. But when they try to go and fix it, there’s another fine mess to clean up. Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek’s Tango is a social allegory with an absurdist twist–there’s a thread of reason…
