Five Course Love. This production consists of five musical scenes set in five different restaurants, each one a broad parody in which author Gregg Coffin spoofs stereotypes while shamelessly using and abusing them. There's a barbecue place featuring country/Western music; an Italian restaurant where a mob wife is cheating — very operatically — on her husband; a cozy German restaurant intended as a place of refuge for the Eleanor Rigbys of the world that ends up hosting a dominatrix and her men; a Mexican cantina where a sweet maiden must decide between the waiter's true love and the lustful excitement offered by an outlaw; and, finally, a standard '50s diner with a doo-wop ambience and a kindly owner called Pop. Three actors whip through all the roles, donning and doffing costumes and assuming jokey accents. It's all really silly — but some of the songs are musically witty (and very well played by musical director Troy Schuh and his musicians) and some downright balls-out daft. Others are really very lovely: the ballad about refuge from the rain sung by the German waiter, for example, and the love song "Blue Flame." Many of the best numbers in Five Course Love occur in the last couple of acts, and it's also only at the end that you learn there's a dramatic reason for a lot of hokeyness. Presented by Denver Center Attractions through June 19, Garner Galleria Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 303-8934100, www.denvercenter.org. Reviewed April 28.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Denver theater audiences are famous for the ease with which they award standing ovations — but Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now reprised at the Avenue Theater, deserved the cheer it got last summer. Born Hansel and desperate to escape Communist East Berlin, Hedwig endures a sex-change operation so that she can marry an American G.I. Long ago abandoned by the G.I, yearning for her beloved Tommy Gnosis — a rock star who owes his success to her songs — she now tours various sleazy dives, wearing a ghastly blond wig with huge soup-can curls on top. Accompanied by her ambiguously sexed husband, Yitzak, and her band, the Angry Inch, she ruminates in song and monologue about the nature of love, still trying to figure out just who she is and where she belongs while performing a slew of fantastic numbers: "The Origin of Love," "Wig in a Box," "Wicked Little Town." Not only are the songs great in this raucous, touching, rock-concert-cum-theater piece, but so are the musicians and actors, particularly Amanda Earls as Yitzak and Nick Sugar's balls-out performance as he goes through his personal cathartic transformation every night from Hansel to Hedwig. The production is an amazing amount of fun, despite touching on issues of identity at the most profound level. Presented at the Avenue Theater through May 29, 417 East 17th Avenue, 303-321-5925, www.avenuetheater.com. Reviewed July 1, 2010.
Indiscretions. Jean Cocteau — famed writer, director, designer and filmmaker — supposedly wrote Indiscretions in 1938, during eight opium-hazed days. The central figure is Yvonne, an irrational, suicidal, diabetic woman who terrorizes her husband, George, and completely dominates and infantilizes Michael, her twenty-year-old son. Yvonne's sister Leo lives with the family; she is nursing her own secret: a frustrated, decades-long love for George. The spur to the play's action is Michael's confession that he finally has a girlfriend, a bookbinder named Madeleine. The news sends Yvonne into a predictable frenzy, and, hoping to appease her, George — who has a secret of his own — and Leo figure out a scheme to torpedo the young couple's relationship. Leo eventually has a change of heart; what she stands to gain from it becomes apparent toward the play's end. Director Ed Baierlein's program notes say his production "highlights the satire of bourgeois values and Jerry Springer-like melodramatic intrigues inherent in the script," but that seems self-contradictory. The people we're seeing on stage aren't bourgeois at all; like Springer's people, they're trashy, and they have broad, undefined accents that swing somewhere between the American South and the West. The acting style is stagey and presentational, and though the laughs come easy in this lively production, the overall experience is puzzling and empty. Presented by Germinal Stage through June 12, 2450 West 44th Avenue, 303-455-7108, www.germinalstage.com. Reviewed May 12.
Rose Colored Glass. Rose Fleishman, a Jewish refugee from Austria, runs a delicatessen in Chicago, right across the alley from a pub owned by Lady O'Riley, a dour Irish widow. Separated by centuries of history, culture and religion, the two women are coldly formal toward each other, but Lady's irrepressible granddaughter, Peg, won't have it. She's forever shuttling between the eateries, chatting, asking questions, thinking up stratagems, and slowly, reluctantly, the women begin speaking to each other. The relationship deepens as Lady learns more about Rose's predicament. It's 1938, and through the increasingly unreliable news channels from Europe, Rose finds out that her sister Sabena has disappeared from Vienna and is either dead or in hiding, and that her eleven-year-old nephew, Abraham, has fled to England. She and Lady join forces to bring the child to America. This is a gentle, nostalgic piece that would make a charming essay, short story or one-act, but there's not enough action to animate a full-length play. The tone is far-reaching and humanistic, however, and important ideas are aired: humankind's provincialism, for example, and the way we tend to ignore far-away tragedies unless there's a specific story and name attached to them. There are also salutary reminders of America's shameful reluctance to take in Jewish refugees during World War II, the bureaucracy and anti-Semitism that saw thousands of professionals, workers and people with prosperous relatives in the United States turned away on the grounds that they might become a public burden. The play also does a good job of re-creating the war as seen from the United States; along with the characters, we attempt to tease out the words from a radio's crackling static and contemplate the huge importance of papers — birth certificates, visas — that can mean the difference between life and death. But the script itself is fairly static. Presented by Miners Alley Playhouse through June 19, 1224 Washington Avenue, Golden, 303-935-3044, www.minersalley.com. Reviewed May 12.
