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…
Brash and bawdy, George Bernard Shaw’s one-act Great Catherine is now playing with his more talky Overruled in a terrific CityStage Ensemble evening, Shaws Together, calculated to bust a gut. As extravagant as both of these little plays are, director Greg Ward keeps his delightful cast tottering on the brink…
It’s easier to preach than it is to teach–but too many contemporary playwrights are still on the pulpit. With all the white-collar crime undermining public confidence in Wall Street these days, one might suppose an angry little play exposing the selfish, callous nastiness of it all would be most welcome…
The great thing about a comedy such as Much Ado About Nothing is its treatment of potential tragedy. There’s a lot of thought behind all those laughs. Shakespeare examined what malicious false witness could do in Othello–how it might turn a good and loving husband into a murderous fool. In…
The 1932 film version of Grand Hotel is best remembered for Greta Garbo’s languid “I vant to be alone.” A better signature line was never invented for an actress–particularly since Garbo was a famous recluse. No one could ever read that line again without invoking her presence as the elusive…
It’s Arthur Miller time in Denver; works by the American playwright have been staged by no less than three local theaters in the past month. And Industrial Arts’ moving, if somewhat choppy, production of Miller’s timeless All My Sons provides an interesting contrast to his more popular but less dynamic…
Agatha Christie’s wonderful murder mystery Ten Little Indians showed up in the movies as And Then There Were None to creep out several generations of fans. The 1970s musical spoof of Christie’s original, Something’s Afoot, adds another dimension of macabre merriment to the legacy. Christie’s original plot may be more…
Inside a moral vacuum is a bad place to be: Not only is it fraught with violence and suffering, it’s boring, too. But somehow that boredom is conveyed without boring the audience in The Lida Project’s consuming production of Edward Bond’s notorious urban horror story Saved. It all takes place…
Materialism is destructive, especially when its false ideals lodge in the breast of a man who is too good for them. In director Jeremy Cole’s beautifully realized staging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s wrenching descent into madness and death speaks eloquently to the “winners and losers”…
The archetypal tale of Beauty and the Beast takes many cultural forms. In all of them, a “beast” loves a “beauty,” wins her love and is then saved by her love from the curse that turned him into a beast. Edmond Rostand’s flagrantly romantic version of the story, Cyrano de…
However extravagant it may seem to say so, Ad Hoc’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters is simply fabulous–hauntingly beautiful and ultimately even inspiring. It’s not perfect, because not all the actors are equally gifted. But those imperfections never detract from the production’s effect on the viewer: nothing less than…
The issues described in Inherit the Wind, now at the Arvada Center, continue to lurk in the news. There are still religious zealots all over America who would like to censor and control those who disagree with them about a wide variety of issues–including the teaching of evolution in the…
Sweetly sardonic, Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser takes as its subject the whole world of the theater. And from the abused and neglected support staffers to the stars in all their megalomaniacal glory, Harwood tells it like it is. The truths he uncovers are amusing, sometimes grand and, finally, disturbing. The…
The ghostly and the ghastly haunt two stages at the Plex just now–one a folk tale metamorphosed into coolly intellectual high art, the other a literary classic mutated into a pop musical. Tony Kushner’s adaptation of S. Ansky’s A Dybbuk offers a rare window into nineteenth-century Hasidic culture with its…
All-male theater–what a concept. The feminist thing has got a number of guys confused, so they’re rethinking issues like the meaning of sports and male bonding, science and metaphysics and, in some instances, the use of profanity. At least that’s the initial impression one gets from Patrick Meyers’s K2. The…
A good journey makes a heroic tale–especially when the protagonist ultimately arrives at new insight. Terrence McNally’s A Perfect Ganesh, though flawed as drama by its own heady ambitions, is one such quest story. And the sterling production at Theatre on Broadway illuminates an already bright play with layers of…
Angels and devils hover in the local theater this season–and it’s about time. First the Broadway road show Angels in America graced the Auditorium Theatre last fall with its tale of God in retreat. Now we have Lucifer Tonite, by Denver’s most intense writer/performer, Don Becker. But while Angels could…
August Wilson is one of America’s great playwrights. His rage, his humor and his humanity find their deepest expression in the construction of character; plot is not the point. Yet each of his plays tells a compelling story, and each story moves us because it strikes home as true and…
If you’re going to revive a period thriller as clunky and passionate as Dial “M” for Murder, for heaven’s sake don’t ignore the very elements that make it interesting–go for the noir! The road-show production of the classic 1950s murder mystery now at the Auditorium Theatre features TV and movie…
Sometimes a play can leap through the centuries and land gracefully in our midst. But it takes a crack cast to handle antiquated language forms and old-fashioned sentiments. To work really well, a revival must speak some fundamental truths about the human condition. The Triumph of Love, an eighteenth-century farce…
