Engaging performances, strong production values and some admiring nods to Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film mark Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre’s pleasant production of Much Ado About Nothing. William Shakespeare’s dark-edged comedy, which Branagh adapted, directed and starred in to deserved acclaim (along with his then-wife Emma Thompson), centers around two pairs…

Prodded to share his emotions with the woman he’s just slept with, a no-nonsense cab driver utters the immortal line, “Feel is a big word.” Like most of the ten urban dwellers in David Hare’s The Blue Room, the cabbie and his one-night partner are relative strangers who seem more…

Kenneth Hoyle might be a ’60s idealist who began his career in the Peace Corps, but during the last couple of decades, he’s become well versed in the cloak-and-dagger office wars that define most every adult’s working life. Spurred on by the lure of regular promotions and raises as well…

The only thing that prevents Accomplice from careening into farcical overdrive is the playwright’s penchant for backtracking over every plot twist and turn. A satirical hybrid that mixes the backstage comedy of Noises Off with the thriller instincts of Deathtrap, Rupert Holmes’s offbeat spoof is the final production of the…

The artfully negotiated tug-of-war that takes place between mortals and spirits in The Secret Garden reaches its apotheosis when an anguished widower and his departed wife finally resolve to set each other free. Summoning a lyrical eloquence that occasionally surfaces elsewhere in the Town Hall Arts Center’s enjoyable production, two…

lthough critics and audiences have been devout in their praise of upstart playwrights like Martin McDonagh, the recent Irish invasion of New York hasn’t left everyone breathless with excitement. In fact, more than a few theater practitioners claim that the sound of broguish prose is drowning out America’s distinct, native…

Most families have a hard enough time taking care of their own problems, let alone those of distant, ailing relatives. But when a primary caregiver discovers that she has leukemia and can’t properly attend to her bedridden father and sick aunt, the proverbial ties that bind the characters in Marvins…

A program note indicates that the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of The Miser, which was written in 1668, is set in “a French Townhouse in the late 1830s.” The post-French Revolution setting would seem appropriate for Jean Baptiste Molière’s play, which explores the relationship between wealth and social position:…

The great German director Max Reinhardt may have been able to mount some 24 different versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including a 1935 film that starred James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck. Most mere mortals, however, learn that presenting even one fully staged production of Shakespeare’s…

What determines a Shakespearean actor’s greatness? Is it the will to uphold established practice while embracing the avant-garde? Does it depend on how ingeniously a performer wrests humanity from every role, whether central or subordinate? And when the dangers of rote and creative stagnation creep into an actor’s great room,…

There are few memorable lines or riveting exchanges in Beautiful Thing. Instead, playwright Jonathan Harvey, whose 1993 work graced off-Broadway six years after it premiered in London, uses everyday, off-the-cuff banter to explore the budding romantic attraction between two teenage boys. And rather than wallow in adolescent angst, the Theatre…

Scholars perennially debate whether it’s an opera or a musical, pundits slather politically correct whitewash over its antiquated portrait of black life and critics alternately champion and decry its eclectic score of ballads, jazzed-up spirituals and show-tune fragments. Audiences, meanwhile, never seem to get enough of the unforgettable melodies and…

In this age of simplistic moralizing, hypersensitivity and polarized opinion, it seems that only an obtuse fable with Hallmarky lyrics is considered worthy of the label “deep.” Gone, sadly, are the days when composers of crowd-pleasers like South Pacific (which enjoyed an initial Broadway run of 1,925 performances), Carousel (890…

Just when it seems like her “choreopoem” might devolve into a smallish, rancorous debate, Ntozake Shange’s heroine/narrator steps to one side of her story and conjures — as only a born poetess can — feelings that are both lacerating and sublime. Brimming with dialogue that’s at once startling and seductive,…

If Richard Nixon had been able to hire Luigi Pirandello as his spin doctor, the American public might have regarded Watergate as little more than a mirage in the vast political desert. But the Italian dramatist (and occasional fascist) died some forty years before the disgraced president was forced from…

As the Acoma Center’s house lights dim, a techno-musical display fades to shadowy silence. Then a young man appears at the edge of the stage and, draped by a backdrop of thousands of stars, stares straight ahead while a disembodied voice intones, “What’s your history?” A few scenes later, the…

Like a silky musical riff that beckons with the promise of discovery, Side Man pays homage to a bygone artistry that championed purity of devotion over shameless self-promotion. Centered around four jazz musicians, Warren Leight’s memory play abounds with soulful passages in which a young man tugs at the dark…

For at least the past hundred years, Irish-born playwrights have made it a habit to explode national myths by spinning stranger-than-fiction yarns of their own. Drawing his inspiration from the years he spent on the Aran islands thirty miles off Galway’s west coast, John Millington Synge tried to evoke the…

The group of Denver natives and Southern Methodist University graduates that formed HorseChart Theatre Company a few seasons back made it their mission to produce plays that “do not make a spectacle of the obvious.” While past productions have tested edgy boundaries and occasionally transported theatergoers to seldom-seen territory, the…

A few weeks before he was supposed to send his newly written play to a Seattle theater company, Robert Lewis Vaughan experienced a sudden change of heart. The Colorado Springs native (now a New Yorker) says that he had a “gut feeling” that he should submit the drama, which is…

The rough conversation and odd behavior permeating War might prove a tad disconcerting for those whose image of Ireland is of modest pastel houses and gently rolling cobblestone streets snuggled together under clouds of cottony mist. Billed as “a contemporary, slice-of-life comedy,” Roddy Doyle’s work simmers with everyday discontent, vulgar…