America loves its gangsters. Not the real ones, of course: We like our gangsters safely enshrined in the movies or on stage, and we like them to be Italian (one more outrageous prejudice). But while we admire the consummate movie godfather, Don Corleone, he’s still pretty scary; once in a…
Perhaps it takes an Eastern European to bring the Theater of the Absurd into the present; after all, people in that part of the world have seen so much more pointless cruelty up close. Pavel M. Dobrusky appears to be qualified, and the Czech director’s new Star Fever at the…
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is one of the great dream narratives of all time. There’s a lot of sense behind the nonsense verse and the bizarre behavior of all those whom Alice meets on her adventure. But then, the life of a dream has a logic of its own…
Ever the sentimentalist, playwright Neil Simon nevertheless has a knack for recognizing the ordinary citizen as interesting. Despite his penchant for safe answers and shallow ideals, Simon still manages to build hilarious dialogue and create characters in whom we invest emotionally. He takes us all in, and most of us…
When an ordinary bloke poses as a foreigner in a remote resort in Georgia, he becomes a magic mirror in which the good-hearted people around him see their better selves and watch their dreams of fulfillment unfold. The evil-hearted, on the other hand, are undone by what they see in…
It’s at the pinnacle of Western civilization, but King Lear is still, first and foremost, a ripping yarn. When a theater company pulls it off, the audience leaves thoroughly entertained and rich in wisdom. A new theater troupe has come to Denver, and the very first thing the Ad Hoc…
We are all related to each other, separated by only six people–six degrees of separation. You may not think you have anything in common with a monk in Tibet, but if you could trace a path through the right six people, you’d find a direct connection. This intriguing, if dubious,…
It could have been, so easily, Cheez Whiz. But The Who’s Tommy, now playing at the Buell Theatre, has evolved into a brawny rock hymn to reconciliation. “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me” is not so much the solipsistic demand of invisible youth it originally was but rather…
David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, now playing at the Boulder Art Center, might be seen as an argument against a career in the theater–sort of a parent’s tool to persuade the aspiring actor in the family to go to law school or become a sanitation engineer. But since…
Beatle boys John and Paul each loved their mum–and they each lost her. That’s one of the key themes running through Lennon and McCartney: The Day They Met, a new work by Denver playwright Michael A. Miller now being performed at the Mercury Cafe. Miller implies that the common loss…
The production of Crazy for You at the Buell Theatre cranks up a full head of steam–and the rest of us have to run with it. Fortunately, most of the time the sprint is worth the effort. After all, the music is George Gershwin’s and the lyrics are Ira Gershwin’s…
What is real? What is illusion? Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre poses these questions in its presentation of Tony (Angels in America) Kushner’s adaptation of French playwright Pierre Corneille’s miraculous L’illusion Comique. Kushner’s brilliant update of the 1636 play, redubbed The Illusion, is funnier and more relevant to a contemporary audience…
One of the best jokes in playwright Jane Wagner’s one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe is found in its title. The question is, just how intelligent is life on earth? Now in an exuberant production at the Avenue Theatre, Wagner’s play asks more questions…
Everybody has a story–sometimes several stories. But a good story isn’t enough; you have to know how to tell it well. So a retired sailor named Ralph discovers during the course of Ralph’s Play, the first and best of two one-acts now playing at the RiverTree Theatre. Denver playwright Pat…
A great production of an excellent play can set you on fire with passion for the art form. You walk out of the theater knowing that something authentic has been uncovered about the very nature of human experience. And you realize that this particular revelation could only come via the…
“It’s hard being easy,” remarks the prostitute in Erik Tieze’s new one-act, Motherlode, the first–and best–of three works by Colorado playwrights in the Changing Scene Theater’s Summerplay: Series 2. She’s wryly describing her own workload, of course. But the line also sums up the predicament faced by the play’s characters:…
Of all the summer musicals available this season, the best so far is Ain’t Misbehavin’, featuring the music of Fats Waller. The production now playing at the Eulipions cultural center erupts with energy, talent and intelligence. These songs are gutsy, wise and full of heart–earthy, sweetly romantic, at times patriotic…
The difficulty in writing a play about another culture and people far, far away is bringing the characters to life. So it comes as no surprise that City-Stage Ensemble’s production of Dan Hiester’s new play, Family Gatherings, a thinly disguised defense of the Palestine Liberation Organization, is a bad trip…
Witchcraft, murder, mayhem, suicide, cynicism and, finally, the tyrant’s head on a pike–Shakespeare really knew how to grab an audience. And despite a somewhat tedious first act, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Macbeth ultimately gives this prurient material the treatment it deserves. The second act is splendid. Even the…
A middle-aged soldier loses his head over a beautiful slut, betrays his wife, his country and himself while spinning slowly into a libertine’s decline. He makes a lot of tactical mistakes as a soldier because he has lost his sense of proportion, all of which eventually leads to his defeat…
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead–and the production now at the Theatre on Broadway very nearly succeeds in burying them. Playwright Tom Stoppard takes two of the most ambiguous figures in Shakespeare, Hamlet’s school chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and gives them a life of their own, creating a story in which…
When the Puritan Malvolio is funny, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night works. It’s an odd comedy, full of dark emotions and motives, sexual ambiguities, deliberate humiliations and mistaken identity. In some productions, these themes are played seriously and the whole show falls apart. Fortunately, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival production finds exactly the…
