Ready to get back into nice, dark theater for a live performance? Small theaters around town are beginning to stir as new seasons get under way, while downtown Fort Collins will throw a Northern Colorado-centric Fringe Festival touting local talent. Say goodbye to summer with these theatrical events. Bright Ideas…
The witty, surprising dialogue is as tangled and twisty, as continually knotting and unfurling, as a ball of wool between the paws of a kitten. Nothing sounds serious, though there’s a whisper of something darker underlying the action, an acknowledgment of the anger and misunderstanding that underlie many marriages, a…
If you haven’t seen <em>Pinter Early & Late</em>, this is your last chance to catch the challenging, enlightening and, yes, entertaining production at Germinal Stage. But there are other worthy shows around town; here are our capsule reviews of a half-dozen current productions that we’ve recently reviewed. The Foreigner: You…
The third High Plains Comedy Festival starts tonight in the Baker neighborhood. Festival founders Andy Juett and Adam Cayton-Holland have created the largest comedy festival in town, with talent ranging wildly from national to local heroes, and activities from standup brunch to highly inappropriate card games. “A lot of different looks, that’s…
Summer might still be going strong, but there are signs that fall is right around the corner: The mornings are cooler, the kids are going back to school and theater companies are beginning to announce their 2015-2016 seasons and opening up ticket sales. Keep an eye on Westword’s theater listings…
Oscar has morphed into Olive and Felix into Florence in The Odd Couple — The Female Version, Neil Simon’s 1980s take on his 1960s hit play, The Odd Couple, which morphed into a movie with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau and then a sitcom featuring Jack Klugman and the inimitable…
Exuding giggly lovability as well as a zen-like center of calm, the comedic persona of Ron Funches is completely sui generis. Like a human Pokémon, Funches is almost cartoonishly adorable — so it’s no wonder he’s found a home doing voiceover work for animated shows like Bob’s Burgers and Bojack…
Kelsie Huff was a mess, a co-dependent drunk from a family of drunks who’d made a shambles of everything in her life. But she’ll tell you that herself — that and a whole lot more about her struggles with alcoholism and her dysfunctional past in Ranch Dressing & Other Coping Mechanisms,…
Global pageantry, dance and history, and a hilarious comedy all have a place on local stages this week, whisking you off to faraway places or taking on all-American pop-culture controversies. Here are the details: Terracotta Warriors 3-D Newman Center for the Performing Arts Through September 6 8 p.m. Tuesdays through…
Pump Boys and Dinettes isn’t so much a play as it is a collection of songs spun around a concept so thin it’s hardly there. The place is a small town on Highway 57 “somewhere between Frog Level and Smyrna,” and the protagonists are four guys who work at a…
Spearheaded by Grafenberg Productions, Camp Atlas is a weekly comedy show at the Atlas Theatre that follows the lives of the fictional camp’s counselors and campers as they navigate their hilarious way through “wacky shenanigans.” The cast features local improvisers Peter Nesbitt, Rachel Walker, JuLee Simmons, Dexter Schiller, Trista Charnas, Castle…
Well before the end of the seemingly endless three hours of vicious invective that is Edge Theater Company’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I’d have been happy to see George strangle Martha or Martha kill George. And given how stellar the acting is in this production, the scene would have…
Curious Theatre Company’s catchphrase is “no guts, no story,” and education director Dee Covington — who also directs and acts — has been helping young writers find and tell their own stories for twelve years through Curious New Voices, a summer playwriting festival. During an intense four-week program, students between…
Cabaret would not be a risky choice for most theater companies. The musical about life in 1930s Berlin has been performed widely on both professional and community stages since its 1966 Broadway premiere. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s writings about a decadent city and a lost young English singer called Sally…
Though most Deverites prefer to while away their hazy August days with poolside day-drinking and late-summer languor, their ventures into the temperate night will reward them with a bounty of belly laughs. Our city’s fine comedy clubs, theaters and breweries have shows to suit every taste and budget. Despite the…
Most comedy nerds are already familiar with Marc Maron’s biography, since he’s perhaps the world’s most renowned podcaster. Maron rose to prominence in the alt-comedy scene of the ’90s before floundering through a few TV and radio gigs that never felt like a perfect fit; despite racking up over forty…
Edith Weiss is giggling. She’s talking about the July 23 opening of The Odd Couple (Female Version) that she’s directing at the historic Barth Hotel downtown, and the cast’s enthusiasm for slapstick acrobatics. “Leslie O’Carroll is doing things I would have never asked her to do,” says Weiss. “She is fearless. She…
Long before Brecht, long before postmodernism, Shakespeare understood the usefulness of self-referential moments in theater — those moments when the audience is reminded that what they’re seeing is a fiction, a construct. At the very beginning of Henry V, the Chorus cautions us that we’re in a theater and apologizes…
Once again, the Colorado Theatre Guild has announced the winners of the Henrys — Colorado’s equivalent of the Tony Awards — and once again the results announced last night are difficult to figure out. As before, there are a lot of wins for the Denver Center Theatre Company and not…
The Biennial of the Americas has already given Denver a marching band continuously walking across the street, Spanish karaoke and orchestral dinosaur calls. Tomorrow members of the Playground Ensemble will team up with young composers to present New Music NOW! The Playground Ensemble is a group of classical musicians who…
It’s not easy to find venues around town that support untested and new forms of expression, and the avenues for experimental and performance art are dwindling. “The art scene was more round in recent years. It’s not so round now,” says Justin Beard, who earned a BFA in sculpture from…
As the final High Plains Comedy Festival draws near and the final lineups are announced, Sexpot Comedy returns to Denver after an exploratory sojourn to Los Angeles, boasting another fine show packed with local talent and a nationally celebrated headliner in Sean White. White, a Chicago based comedian whose album…
