Shortly after bidding adieu to his bustling wife, a Malibu writer settles into a porch chair and begins his work. Seated at one side of a sparely appointed stage, the wiry figure peers at the audience with a gaze that both acknowledges our presence and enlists our imaginations. He rises…

Nothing in Maynard has changed since the Civil War,” says a young woman of her Texas community’s stultifying ways. Consigned to a life of folding clothes, screaming at her three kids and indulging in midday liquor-laced gossip sessions, Hattie’s sweeping assessment doesn’t seem that far-fetched to anyone who’s spent her…

Nuncrackers: The Nunsense Christmas Musical is a collection of sketches, songs and sight gags that work best when they’re briskly paced and centered on a single character. During its many multiple-character scenes and lame segues, however, Dan Goggin’s musical revue about the Little Sisters of Hoboken fizzles into a predictable,…

Encouraged in no small measure by the fact that Denver’s cultural groups annually outdraw all local professional sports teams combined, several ambitious theater companies have recently elbowed their way onto the city’s crowded stage. Rather than join forces with established organizations that operate their own spaces (and boast loyal followings),…

It’s hard to believe that what happens in Miracle on 34th Street bears any resemblance to everyday life. But as the Nomad Theatre’s entertaining revival demonstrates, the story has the ability to awaken ideals long ago beaten into a coma by megadoses of hard reality. Of course, those who attend…

About ten minutes after Stop Kiss begins, we learn that its two main characters, a pair of young women oblivious to their surroundings at the moment their mouths met in romantic bliss, were violently attacked while hanging out in a Greenwich Village park during the wee hours of the morning…

Its title is a clever play on Tantalus, the high-priced Greek epic that effectively displaced the Denver Center’s annual presentation of A Christmas Carol, but theatreMEDINA’s Santaless: The Twelve Plays of Christmas proves to be a collection of aimless skits worth considerably less than its $20 admission. Haphazardly constructed and…

A product of its time that proved powerful enough to transcend the tumult of ensuing decades, The Fantasticks opened at New York’s Sullivan Street Playhouse on May 3, 1960, and has been running there ever since. Although its universal appeal is unparalleled in musical theater history, some critics continue to…

Anton Chekhov is as famous for writing pause-filled comedies about frustrated dreamers as Eugene O’Neill is for penning dramas with more stage direction than dialogue. Beyond their writerly quirks, however, both men were masters at creating unforgettable characters. And the Shadow Theatre Company’s evening of one-acts pays homage to each…

The pacing lags when it should accelerate, and the actors’ delivery never matches the dialogue’s sharp brilliance, but the Upstart Crow Theatre Company’s production of The Rivals is a gorgeously costumed community theater production. In addition to providing Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play with an adequate staging, director Joan Kuder Bell…

Antigone’s two brothers, both sons of Oedipus, have died in each other’s arms while fighting for future control of their uncle Creon’s throne. In order to send a message to future revolutionaries, King Creon has decreed that one of the slain will be left to rot outside the walls of…

British playwright Alan Ayckbourn is often regarded as England’s version of Neil Simon. But while both master craftsmen have an affinity for rim-shot-style comedy — Simon started out as a writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, as did Mel Brooks and Woody Allen — they are careful to…

Of the thirty-plus songs that constitute the musical revue Jerry¹s Girls, only one proves to be more than a display of vocal pyrotechnics or choreographic cuteness. Oddly enough, that distinction belongs to a tune that’s performed in drag by an actor whose ambling gait, ill-fitting gown and rouged face drew…

As wrongheaded as it is well-intentioned, CityStage Ensemble’s world-premiere production of Bad Money flounders from the very first scene and never gains much of a foothold thereafter. Ostensibly written in the style of film noir, which uses ambiguity to heighten mystery, cloak clever plot twists and slowly reveal character, David…

Perched atop a high, bare platform and isolated in a pool of bluish-white light, a search-and-rescue pilot talks about why she’s devoted herself to serving the needs of others even as she chooses to reside on life’s perimeter. Surveying the landscape below, the youthful Maxine (Kristin Erickson) quietly says to…

Hampered by pacing problems and a couple of lackluster opening scenes, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of The Show-Off doesn’t hit its stride until the end of Act One, when a mother-daughter debate over love and marriage kicks the proceedings into high gear. Penned by veteran vaudeville entertainer George…

Eleven-year-old Miguel knows all too well that his journey into manhood will begin only when his father takes him on the family’s annual sheep-herding trip to the Sangre de Cristo mountains. When the crucial decision day arrives, though, Papa says Miguel must remain behind, forcing the disappointed youth to endure…

For much of the past year, pundits the world over have wondered whether John Barton’s Tantalus would be a millennium-defining hit or flop. Much like the nature of Greek myths themselves, British theater legend Peter Hall’s twelve-hour-plus production proves less absolute, drifting between scenes of wonderment and rhetoric, feeling and…

The truth-telling games and litany of deceptions that litter Conundrum State Productions’ version of The Maiden¹s Prayer might be tolerable if director Scott Gibson were to provide Nicky Silver’s play with an adequate staging. As it is, the two-act play languishes under a slew of problems, including vast passages of…

Dan Hiester remembers the days when he dealt with exhaustion by sleeping round the clock after completing the run of each show. Then, somewhat rejuvenated by his two- or three-day slumber, he’d hurl himself into the next project. But soon after the artistic director of Denver’s CityStage Ensemble got the…

Mabel Tidings Bigelow has lived most of her ninety years contemplating her choices in life. The feisty Massachusetts salt aspired at an early age to be the first woman to swim the English Channel in the direction opposite to the one taken by Channel pioneer Gertrude Ederle (who swam the…

Poets are often harbingers of truth who rail about society’s ills from the relative safety of life’s cheap seats. They weather worldly rejection and familial contempt in the hope that something they say or do will better the human race. The knotted-up artistes at the epicenter of Craig Lucas’s Missing…