Performing Arts

Beth Stelling is a Los Angeles based comedian who has appeared on Conan, and recently won the internet on Comedy Central’s @Midnight. Her debut album Sweet Beth is available from Rooftop Comedy. Stelling, who cut her teeth in Chicago’s vibrant comedy scene is visiting Denver to co-headline Sexpot Comedy’s Ice Queens and Ice Wizards comedy showcase with Kate Berlant. In advance of the show, Westword caught up with Beth Stelling for an early morning phone interview punctuated by adorable kitten yawns to talk about Ice Queens, the tiny failures of open mics, and co-writing her play Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche.

The entrance to Edge Theatre is in a small, gray Lakewood strip mall, but once you open the door and step inside, you encounter a warm, colorful space that includes three rooms serving as galleries for local artists, a bar and — of course — the auditorium, cunningly curtained and…

Matthew Lopez’s The Legend of Georgia McBride, now receiving its world premiere at the Denver Center Theatre, began as a staged reading at last year’s New Play Summit. Lopez has two plays running in Denver right now, and both feature original and intriguing central concepts. In The Whipping Man, currently…

While beloved Colfax watering hole, the Park House tavern has been a well-regarded live music venue since opening their doors back in 2012, their foray into hosting comedy performances has been a more recent development. Beginning with Bobby Crane’s whimsically named “Jolly Trolley” open mic, the amiable Park House staff has welcomed Denver’s unwashed comics into the fold to utter deplorable things into their high-class sound-system week after week, quickly emerging as an essential part of a local comedian’s tuesday night itinerary. This friday, however, the Park House is doubling down on comedy, by mounting a new showcase featuring some of the funniest comics in town.

Chay Yew is a hot director who was in the news a year or two ago when he took over Chicago’s acclaimed Victory Gardens Theatre and made several controversial changes. The strife at the time, according to the New York Times, “recalls family melodramas like August Osage County or even…

Pablo Francisco is a comedian who has performed all over the world and appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Mad TV. Reknown for his spot-on impressions and high-energy performances, Rodriguez is in town for a weekend of shows that kick off at 7:30pm tonight at the Denver Improv Westword caught up with Francisco to discuss his Dog the Bounty Hunter, performing comedy overseas, and Shotgun WIllies in a phone chat peppered with digressions and spot-on vocal impressions that print can’t really capture.

There are many narratives that celebrate the coming together of once intractable enemies — Arab and Israeli, peasant and landowner, torturer and tortured — with scenes showing growing comprehension, forgiveness, even respect and affection. But in 1865, immediately following the defeat of Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Appomattox,…

Two bastions of Denver’s DIY are closing up shop this year. The Festivus Film Festival, which was founded in 2007, and its spin-off the Laugh Track Comedy Festival ceased operation before the end of last year. Aside from providing many local comedians and filmmakers with a valuable opportunity to network and hone their craft for a hip audience, the festivals coalesced our scenes and paved the way for future festivals, like August’s High Plains Comedy Festival. Westword reached out to the founders and organizers of both festivals for their thoughts on the unfortunate conclusion of their passion project. Read on for their quotes and clips of highlights throughout the years.

The setting for Gidion’s Knot is familiar and innocuous — a brightly colored children’s classroom with low tables and plastic chairs, student papers neatly tacked up on one board, another board covered with drawings inspired by mythology. But a psychological whirlwind will soon be let loose in this setting, in…

2013 was a great year for comedy nerds. With so many comedy specials, albums, and formats available, fans can exhaust themselves consuming 2013 comedy and still barely scratch the surface of what’s out there. It was also a year marked by lackluster efforts from great comedians. Thinky Pain, from Marc Maron, is little more than a punched-up episode of his WTF podcast, while on Caligula, Anthony Jeselnik seems like his own schtick is eating him alive. Fortunately, however, 2013 also witnessed strong outings from two of today’s most prolific comics (Louis CK and Aziz Ansari) killer debuts (like Kumail Najiani’s Beta Male) and welcome returns from veterans like Bill Cosby. Netflix has emerged as a player on the comedy distribution market in recent years, producing specials for several comics through their partnership with New Wave Entertainment. While the old guard of HBO and Comedy Central are still turning out great specials each year, self-distribution and new players on the scene have been a boon to fans who today enjoy access to a greater breadth of comic voices than ever before.

Though it’s known as a home to artists, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, scientists and other creative types, Boulder was pretty much a theatrical wasteland in 2006 when husband and wife Stephen Weitz and Rebecca Remaly decided to start the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company. By then, Nomad, the Quonset hut that had housed…

Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.

Gifted is in many ways a standard family drama, complete with child-parent misunderstandings, sibling squabbles and the perpetual battle between wife and mother-in-law. But the interest level is decisively heightened by the fact that this is a mixed-race family — and we all know the fascinating stuff that happens when…

A Christmas Carol. The power of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol — and the reason it keeps getting resurrected in so many forms, Christmas after Christmas — stems from the depths of sorrow that underlie the joyously optimistic resolution. Ebenezer Scrooge lives in a London where poor people face the…

Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.

Channel 12’s Sounds on 29th series brings local sounds to the airwaves, but without much of a budget, fundraising is a must to keep the Denver music showcase alive. To that end, Sounds hosted a benefit based on The Gong Show, the famed Chuck Barris game show of the ’70s,…

The power of Charles Dickens’s famous novella A Christmas Carol — and the reason it keeps getting resurrected in so many forms, Christmas after Christmas — stems from the depths of sorrow that underlie the joyously optimistic resolution. Ebenezer Scrooge lives in a London where poor people face the kind…

Jackie and Me. Jackie and Me ,Steven Dietz’s dramatization of a young-adult book by Dan Gutman, is a kids’ show, and also a remarkably flat and didactic one. It tells the story of a baseball-crazed boy named Joey Stoshak, who, with the help of a magical baseball card, goes back…

Luis Valdez, whose Christmas play La Pastorela just opened at Denver’s Su Teatro, first met Cesar Chavez when he was six, growing up among the migrant workers of Delano, California, where the United Farm Workers movement took root in the nonviolent strikes and grape boycotts of the ’60s and ’70s…

When she tours fringe festivals around the world, Gemma Wilcox sees a lot of performances. “When I see an incredible show that blows everything else out of the water, it’s very rare,” says Wilcox. But when she finds something special, she likes to bring it to Boulder. 6 Guitars is…

This is it: Merry Christmas to All, and to All a Good-Bye is the last show at Heritage Square Music Hall — a strange venue that’s half true Western-style building, half pure Disney-level kitsch. If you’re already a fan of the 25-year-old troupe, catch this show immediately. And if you’re…

Jackie and Me. Jackie and Me, Steven Dietz’s dramatization of a young-adult book by Dan Gutman, is a kids’ show, and also a remarkably flat and didactic one. It tells the story of a baseball-crazed boy named Joey Stoshak, who, with the help of a magical baseball card, goes back…