Aaron Loeb’s Ideation is a shot to the gut — not a primitive one, but a sophisticated, fine-tuned thrust, as if a Victorian gentleman had whipped the concealed blade out of his ivory-headed walking cane and pierced you through the middle. Except that this play isn’t elegant, exactly. It’s a…

The 2016 theater season is off to a great start — but you’ll have to hurry if you want to see 4000 Miles, which closes this weekend. Keep reading for a capsule review of the Miners Alley production, as well as another worthy show, Fade. 4000 Miles. The plot of…

Sometimes the best productions pop up when you’re not expecting anything out of the ordinary. Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles is admittedly a Pulitzer finalist — but so are many mediocre scripts. It’s a low-key, four-character, ninety-minute work, and it arrived on the Miners Alley stage without a burst of glowing…

As holiday shows take the stage, a less cheery — but definitely worthy — production is closing. This weekend is your last chance to see Equus at the Avenue Theater; here’s our capsule review of that show, as well as the third installment of the Brothers Trilogy at Curious Theatre…

Tanya Saracho’s Fade began as a brief outline at last year’s Colorado New Play Summit. A writer on Girls, Devious Maids, Looking and How to Get Away With Murder, Saracho was subsequently commissioned by DCPA Theatre Company artistic director Kent Thompson to expand her vision, and the result is a…

Hey, hey, LBJ/How many kids did you kill today? I remember chanting this with hundreds of other demonstrators as we marched against the war in Vietnam. We knew the war was a vicious travesty and that the president’s lies had forced us into it. When a weary-looking Lyndon Baines Johnson…

Tell Me on a Sunday is a one-woman song cycle created by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1979 with lyrics by Don Black, and the Avenue Theater is giving the show a meticulous production — but there’s not a lot of payoff for the care that went into the set, the…

Two or three times over the past few days, I’ve found myself describing the opening scene of The Nest to friends, telling them what a funny, explosive beginning it is to a fascinating play and urging them to call the Denver Center for the Performing Arts for tickets. In this…

Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which premiered in 1985, is a sad, angry play that vividly evokes the atmosphere of those early AIDS years, when headlines spoke of a strange new cancer affecting gay men and the cause and progression of the illness were unknown. All that was known was…

Edge Theater Company took a big risk in mounting Euripides’s Medea as the first show in what it’s calling “the year of the woman.” After all, how many Denverites want to spend an evening pondering a straight-up Greek tragedy? But utilizing the clear, literate, modern-without-being-obtrusive translation of poet Alistair Elliot,…

Olivia is a novelist nearing forty whose first book received mixed reviews and limited attention; as Sex With Strangers opens, she’s at a writer’s retreat and working on a new novel. This one, she’s convinced herself, she’s doing for herself alone , for the private joy of writing. The scene…

Murder for Two, now playing at the Garner Galleria, is a small musical but a dizzying one, spinning through ninety minutes with two actors and a piano — although it has far more than two characters, as well as clever, tuneful songs and fun, inspired patter from creators Joe Kinosian…

In a 1951 obituary for singer-comedian Fanny Brice, the New York Times mentions her parody of the famed “Dying Swan” ballet from Swan Lake and “her take-off of Camille with W. C. Fields as the maid,” and adds that Times critic Brooks Atkinson called her “a burlesque comic of the…

The Addams Family relies on our enduring affection for a group of death- and darkness-loving misfits created by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams in the 1940s. His work inspired several television shows and three films before morphing into this musical by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, with music by Andrew…

To its credit, Edge Theatre Company has staged a world premiere annually for the past four years, all scripts by local playwrights. Some of the productions have revealed major talent, and that’s what I thought during the first hour or so of Jeffrey Neuman’s Exit Strategies. Sure, the play’s basic…

Simon is thirteen years old — that confusing in-between time when most of as are struggling to find our own identities and our imaginations are at their most fluid, expansive and fantastical — and he’s a religious obsessive. He isn’t filled with love or wonder, he has no sense of…

Peter Shaffer’s Equus was written in 1973, when many cultural assumptions were being upended and some influential thinkers questioned the most basic premises of psychiatry. Their essential point — and I may be oversimplifying — was that the culture was insane, and to remain sane in an insane world is…

As I watched Curious Theatre Company’s production of Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, there were moments when the close-to-heretical thought entered my mind that playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney has been anointed a giant of the contemporary theater far too soon, that this play is raggedy in conception and goes…

Emily K. Harrison, artistic director of Square Product Theatre, has always preferred presenting work that’s either original or hasn’t been seen in this area before, but she taught Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive at the University of Colorado and feels a strong connection to this complex,…

The summer theater season is ending, but there are still a few shows to see this weekend. Here are capsule reviews of two productions on local stages this weekend. Relatively Speaking.  Witty, surprising dialogue as tangled and twisty and as continually knotting and unfurling as a ball of wool between…