Thanks to the Denver Center Theatre Company’s New Play Summit, we had the privilege of seeing Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale — which had a reading at the DCTC in 2011 and earned a full production by the company a year later — before it became a major success in…
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy families are alike; each dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way. The family at the center of Nina Raine’s Tribes is dysfunctional in a highly verbal, entertaining and also dismaying way. Father Christopher is a writer and critic whose loud carping spills over into…
Some of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century were made by gentleman explorer-scientists. But Charles Darwin never devised a test for pet guinea-pig intelligence, nor did botanist Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker name a plant that induced first euphoria and then death for a woman he was attracted to. And…
As I was trying to understand the cause for my scratchy irritability when I left Spirits to Enforce — particularly surprising since I’d liked playwright Mickle Maher’s There Is a Happiness That Morning Is, which Catamounts staged last year — I thought of Aldous Huxley’s essay “The Rest Is Silence,”…
Peg is a sketch artist for the police, and her apartment is filled with charcoal portraits of criminals, both petty and murderous. As Good on Paper opens, she’s celebrating a birthday with her sister Sandy, a romance writer, and explaining the end of her latest affair: She broke up with…
As You Like It is an extended examination of love set in the Forest of Arden — a place that the Elizabethans, steeped in a pastoral tradition that idealized country life, would have seen as far more pure and innocent than life at court. “Come hither, come hither, come hither,”…
After decades of productions of West Side Story, both professional and amateur, it’s hard to grasp how daring and original the notion of a contemporary musical based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was in the 1950s. The idea originated with director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein and script writer Arthur…
John Patrick Shanley first visited his father’s birthplace in Ireland in 1993, and Outside Mullingar, which opened last year in New York, is a clear response to what he found there. We know this Ireland he depicts — rural, muddy and barren; we know of its isolated farms and the…
American Girls might be the antidote to Girls Only, a giggly, anodyne and essentially contentless production based on the teenage diaries of its two creators: never mean, never disconcerting, never surprising — the kind of show you take in when you crave drinks with your girlfriends and don’t have the…
At the dramatic end of the first act of Matilda the Musical, the much-wronged little heroine shouts out her rage, pain and defiance in one charged sentence — and a murmur arises from the audience: “What did she say?” That’s right: It’s impossible to understand half the dialogue. Or the…
The Avenue Theater, long known for comedy, has been undergoing a prolonged transition since the departure of artistic director Bob Wells. The Avenue is a shabby, comfortable and unpretentious theater that you could always visit in your grubbies for a drink or two and a relaxing evening, though every now…
The witty, surprising dialogue is as tangled and twisty, as continually knotting and unfurling, as a ball of wool between the paws of a kitten. Nothing sounds serious, though there’s a whisper of something darker underlying the action, an acknowledgment of the anger and misunderstanding that underlie many marriages, a…
If you haven’t seen <em>Pinter Early & Late</em>, this is your last chance to catch the challenging, enlightening and, yes, entertaining production at Germinal Stage. But there are other worthy shows around town; here are our capsule reviews of a half-dozen current productions that we’ve recently reviewed. The Foreigner: You…
Oscar has morphed into Olive and Felix into Florence in The Odd Couple — The Female Version, Neil Simon’s 1980s take on his 1960s hit play, The Odd Couple, which morphed into a movie with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau and then a sitcom featuring Jack Klugman and the inimitable…
Pump Boys and Dinettes isn’t so much a play as it is a collection of songs spun around a concept so thin it’s hardly there. The place is a small town on Highway 57 “somewhere between Frog Level and Smyrna,” and the protagonists are four guys who work at a…
Well before the end of the seemingly endless three hours of vicious invective that is Edge Theater Company’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I’d have been happy to see George strangle Martha or Martha kill George. And given how stellar the acting is in this production, the scene would have…
Curious Theatre Company’s catchphrase is “no guts, no story,” and education director Dee Covington — who also directs and acts — has been helping young writers find and tell their own stories for twelve years through Curious New Voices, a summer playwriting festival. During an intense four-week program, students between…
Cabaret would not be a risky choice for most theater companies. The musical about life in 1930s Berlin has been performed widely on both professional and community stages since its 1966 Broadway premiere. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s writings about a decadent city and a lost young English singer called Sally…
Since Brian Coppom took over as director of the Boulder County Farmers’ Market toward the end of last year, he has put a lot of thought into ways of empowering local farmers and increasing the overall viability of the market. His influence was evident almost from the moment he took…
Long before Brecht, long before postmodernism, Shakespeare understood the usefulness of self-referential moments in theater — those moments when the audience is reminded that what they’re seeing is a fiction, a construct. At the very beginning of Henry V, the Chorus cautions us that we’re in a theater and apologizes…
Once again, the Colorado Theatre Guild has announced the winners of the Henrys — Colorado’s equivalent of the Tony Awards — and once again the results announced last night are difficult to figure out. As before, there are a lot of wins for the Denver Center Theatre Company and not…
This is theater as community. It is holy theater not because it exalts something on high, but because for the hour or so onstage, the audience and actor are one, and all those people, though each seeing it slightly differently, are believing — following the same course or going on…
