Theater companies are packing up the tinsel and fake snow for another season, but there are still a few more options on local stages. Keep reading for capsule reviews of productions around town, including one stunner that closes this weekend: The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

The Edge Theater’s production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge doesn’t go for electrifying drama or make a point of foreshadowing the play’s incipient violence in the naturalistic early scenes. But this in no way diminishes the involving nature of the experience, the shock of the climax or…

Once a year or so, the Lone Tree Arts Center enlists the services of director Randal Myler and puts on a play; these productions are always impeccably cast and stylishly staged. This year’s is a festive holiday piece, It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, writer Joe Landry’s version…

Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, now playing at Miners Alley, walks the line between comedy and moments of real pathos. Barlow is the author of the Tony-winning The 39 Steps, a send-up of Hitchcock that’s also an homage, and his witty Christmas Carol script is fairly faithful to the…

I’ve seen many productions of A Christmas Carol over the years, most of them pleasant in a Hallmark card sort of way, none of them memorable. So I’m trying to figure out just what makes this year’s A Christmas Carol, an annual offering at the Denver Center for the Performing…

The Aurora Fox’s production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess left me with a head swimming with music, ideas and feelings inspired by the sweep and majesty of the chorus’s offerings, the sheer beauty of the songs, and questions about changes to the original 1935 folk opera, titled simply Porgy…

While the Arvada Center production of I’ll Be Home for Christmas is a lump of coal in the holiday-show stocking (read the review of I’ll Be Home here), other offerings around town look much more promising. Here are four to explore: 1. A Christmas Carol is essentially the same production…

Usually a show having its world premiere in Denver is something to celebrate, but every now and then you wonder if you’re witnessing a premiere only because no other theater in the country wanted to stage the thing. I’ll Be Home for Christmas, a musical written by Kenn McLaughlin with…

In Lost Creatures, local playwright Melissa Lucero McCarl imagines a meeting between two highly theatrical figures of the last century. The first is Kenneth Tynan, a theater critic whose brilliant writing brought him early fame. Guardian reviewer Michael Billington recently wrote that reading the book of essays that Tynan released…

Curious Theatre Company’s Hand to God is loud, herky-jerky, foul-mouthed and funny enough to have you choking with laughter. That’s if a certain malevolent sock puppet hasn’t decided to leap into the audience and choke off your breath altogether. The puppet is Tyrone, and he lives — I use the…

When she was four years old, my friend’s daughter Joy was probing one of the most profound mysteries of the universe. A passionate pursuer of justice and mercy even at that young age, she was sitting on the pot and interrogating her mother about the world. Why, given a caring…

I recently read an interview with the brilliant writer and art critic John Berger, now ninety years old, in which Kate Kellaway quotes Berger’s Ways of Seeing: “The secret of reading aloud well, he says…is ‘refusing to look ahead, to be in the moment.’ And he says that a story…

A man in a hospital bed is having a lively conversation with the woman sitting in a chair by his side. Amid all kinds of teasing and laughter, Sander explains how he came to be injured: something about the scent of a certain perfume, taking an elevator he’d been warned…

When I last saw Jada Suzanne Dixon, it was in White Guy on the Bus at Curious, and she was a single mother, a nursing student traveling by bus to visit her brother in prison, a poor and powerless woman who’s eventually confronted by a wrenching dilemma. Dixon couldn’t be…

The vampire flies on, and our fascination with him never seems to falter. We find him in television shows, teenage novels and the pulsing hearts of teenage readers, and in films both serious and camp — from F.W. Murnau’s subtle, haunted Nosferatu to Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, with…

Somewhere in the mid-1970s, when we were both students at the University of Colorado, Terry Dodd worked with a feminist theater group I’d co-founded, playing the unnamed man who absconded with a beautiful store-room dummy in Joanna Russ’ one-act, Window Dressing. My mother was dying of cancer at the time…

We’re so used to camp and comic versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that it’s a bit of a shock to encounter a theatrical experience that takes the story seriously as a statement about scientific hubris and an exploration of love, loneliness, hatred, good and evil — and what it really…

The Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, which turned forty this year, includes art galleries, meeting rooms, community gathering places and two theaters: the original Main Stage, which usually hosts big musicals, and the newer Black Box Theater, which is as large and well-appointed as many companies’ main stages…