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…
The Taming, a political satire by Lauren Gunderson, is the first offering of the Catamounts’ 2016-’17 season. The play doesn’t probe very deep, despite the reference to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and a nod to Sartre’s No Exit. But it does provide some points to ponder, some feminist verve, a…
The mood was celebratory at the opening of the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company’s Ripcord, the first show of the company’s eleventh season, and also the first at the Dairy Arts Center after the building’s year-long renovation. Over the past twelve months, BETC has performed in the Boulder Chamber of Commerce…
Buntport Theater Company is kicking off the fall season by bringing back Middle Aged People Sitting in Boxes; the show opens tomorrow. Here’s our capsule review of the original production: A clothesline on which tops and bras are hung spans the stage. Other than that, the set consists of four shrouded…
The room, with its floor of lighted squares, seems small and isolated in darkness. It’s edged by the black metal railings of the fire escape. This is St. Louis, where author Tennessee Williams grew up, during the impoverished years of the 1930s, and The Glass Menagerie is autobiographical, a memory…
At the start of God of Carnage, four people are sitting in a beautifully appointed living room. The decor (courtesy of Jonathan Scott-McKean) has orange and turquoise notes but is never garish; there’s a vase of flame-colored tulips on the coffee table, which also holds a stack of expensive art…
Water by the Spoonful is the second in a trilogy of plays by Quiara Alegría Hudes being shown as part of Curious Theatre Company’s serial storytelling project. The third, The Happiest Song Plays Last, opens next February; the first, Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue, was presented in March. But artistic director…
New Orleans grande dame Violet Venable is interviewing Dr. Cukrowicz. A young researcher, he is setting up a lobotomy clinic and needs money, money that she’s willing to supply if he’ll agree to lobotomize her niece, Catharine. Catharine was on vacation in Europe with Violet’s son, Sebastian, when he died…
Denver’s Phamaly, the first national theater company comprised of actors with varying disabilities, has been a local treasure since it was established in 1989, producing serious theater and regular summer musicals. Through many of those years, actor Regan Linton was at the center of the company’s productions. She was an…
Local stages are going dark as companies prepare to raise the curtain on their fall seasons. But there are still a few worthwhile productions around town, including The Last Romance at the Barth Hotel. Keep reading for our capsule review of that show, as well as two more. Footloose. The…
The Edge Theater Company has never staged a musical during its six years, nor has Edge artistic director Rick Yaconis ever directed one — until now, when Edge is roaring into the new season with a scintillating pop-rock work called Murder Ballad. This isn’t a standard musical. The small-scale, sung-through…
Frankie and Johnny work at a greasy spoon in New York. He’s a short-order cook and she’s a waitress. When we first encounter them in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, they’re having passionate sex in the dark. Which leaves us, the audience, in the dark, too, listening…
“The first time I wrote a play, I was teaching high-school theater, 25 years ago,” says John Moore, the award-winning former Denver Post theater critic and current senior arts journalist at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. After that came a long hiatus until Brian Freeland, then artistic director…
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival wraps up its 2016 season this weekend on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. To see if you can still score a ticket, call 303-492-0554 or go to coloradoshakes.org. Read our capsule reviews of three of this season’s shows, all still playing. The Comedy of Errors. Egeon…
As it heads into its fourth year, the Flatirons Food Film Festival has “grown to have a life of its own,” says director Julia Joun. “There’s great receptiveness, because food and film are so big.” But you can’t grow without some fertilizer, and to raise funds, the festival is hosting…
Every year, Senior Housing Options, which provides safe, caring housing for indigent older and disabled people in several Colorado locations, mounts a theater production at Denver’s Barth Hotel as a fundraiser. This year, the play is Joe DiPietro’s The Last Romance, and the money will go toward safety equipment and…
In Little Shop of Horrors, currently showing at Miners Alley, Seymour, a nerdy young guy who works in a failing florist shop that’s situated, inexplicably, on skid row, is hopelessly in love with fellow worker Audrey. Unfortunately, she is in a relationship with Orin Scrivello, a sadistic dentist, and is…
I’ll Eat You Last is subtitled “A Chat With Sue Mengers,” who was the top-tier agent to some of Hollywood’s starriest stars — or, as she calls them here, “my twinklies”; those twinklies included Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen, Gore Vidal, Nick Nolte, Michael Caine and, most important, Barbra Streisand. And…
The set for Thaddeus Phillips’s the ARCHIVIST is perhaps the most important character in this experimental, brain-dizzying work-in-progress at Buntport. Towering white columns of file boxes divide the playing area, boxing in — almost literally — the Archivist in all his magnificent and delusional loneliness. Beyond the columns, the darkened…
There actually was a time when rock and roll and the happy gyrations of teens dancing to the music were considered sinful and a sure precursor to every kind of sleazy and drug-hazed sex, a time when respectable parents were so nervous about Elvis Presley’s hip thrusts and controversy ran…
I didn’t want to see the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Troilus and Cressida. I had seen the play once before — and read it as a student — and vaguely remembered the plot, though almost no details. Still, I knew it was a problem play that sits somewhere between…
The first time I saw a work by Thaddeus Phillips, a Denver native who now runs Philadelphia-based Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, was at Buntport Theater on a cold night in 2001. The piece was called Shakespeare’s Storms and there were around fifteen people in the audience — two of them being me…
