It’s a good sign when you hear people laughing in the parking lot after a comedy and describing their favorite moments to each other, complete with crazy gestures. In its second week of a now-extended run, The Foreigner was still filling the comfortably worn auditorium of the John Hand Theater…

The plot of The Spitfire Grill, a small-scale musical now at the Vintage Theatre, is in the tradition of those ubiquitous American dramas in which a stranger comes into a small town that’s stuck in time — tradition-bound or dying — and shakes everything up. It’s a story we’ve seen…

This is the second time in two years I’ve watched actor Geoffrey Kent walk away with a production in which he’s not actually the lead. Last year his Hotspur stole every scene of Henry IV, Part One that he entered. Now Kent is playing Iago in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s…

The year is 1517, the place Wittenberg, Germany, site of a famous university. The world is in turmoil in David Davalos’s play, Wittenberg, with new ideas swirling and old certainties dissolving. Martin Luther, priest and professor of theology, is composing his 95 theses, which challenge Johann Tetzel, a friar who…

It was a hot evening when I saw Pinter Early & Late at Germinal Stage, and the tiny theater was sometimes uncomfortably warm. The sound in the space is efficient — you can hear every word — but without the clarity and crispness ideal for Pinter. And yet the production…

It’s hard to go wrong when you begin a production with a bunch of guys in an Irish pub drunkenly singing the Clancy Brothers’ “Isn’t it grand, boys, to be bloody well dead? Let’s not have a snivel, let’s have a bloody good cry. And always remember, the longer you…

Young Frankenstein is close to wrapping up its monstrously successful run at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center, so grab tickets now. Meanwhile, Detroit continues to roll at Curious Theatre Company and Mary Poppins has landed at BTD Stage in Boulder. Keep reading for capsule reviews of these productions. Detroit. Detroit…

After two days of raging thunderstorms that would have provided an appropriate backdrop for King Lear, the weather was bright and mild on the opening night of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival — perfect for Much Ado About Nothing, one of Shakespeare’s loveliest and best-constructed comedies. But this production mixes so…

For Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers created a legendary children’s book about a nanny who descends on the stuffy, upper-class Victorian household of the Banks family and proceeds to tame two unruly children and enlighten their parents with discipline, kindness and magic. The book had a lasting effect on me when…

If you haven’t seen the Edge Theater’s production of <em>Jerusalem</em> yet, this weekend is your last chance — and you don’t want to miss it. Keep reading for a capsule review of that show, as well as two more on local stages. Detroit. Detroit is intelligent, absorbing, lively, surprising and…

When the tall, beautiful dramatic actress Anne Bancroft was asked what had drawn her to Mel Brooks, the short, funny-looking creator of shows and movies filled with broad, cheesy, Borscht Belt-style humor to whom she ended up married, she replied, “Mel had a lethal weapon: He made me laugh to…

During the talkback following a performance of Curious Theatre Company’s Detroit, an audience member asked: “What was the play’s message?” This isn’t a question I normally ask — I’ve never thought that works of art need messages — but in this case, the query was right on the money. There’s…

Spring is almost here, and local productions are blooming on stages across town. We even have two versions of Cock, one at Avenue Theatre and one at Edge, reviewed below. Keep reading for capsule reviews of five current productions, including Big Fish, which closes on Sunday. A Public Reading of…

The year is 1964 and the setting Dublin for A Man of No Importance, a gentle, high-spirited musical currently showing at the Arvada Center. Inspired by Oscar Wilde, bus conductor Alfie Byrne longs to devote his life to art. His plans for a production of The Importance of Being Earnest…

No matter how many dreary events it’s played at, “Jerusalem” — a hymn with lyrics from a poem by William Blake set to music by Sir Hubert Parry — never loses the power to move and astonish, unlike so many jingoistic anthemic songs. “Jerusalem” speaks of a mythic time when…

You’re familiar with the term tragi-comedy? Terry Johnson’s Hysteria could be considered a tragi-farce. It’s full of farcical elements: multiple doors, unexpected exits and entrances, mistaken identities, misunderstandings, a naked woman in a closet, silly accents, women’s panties, a man without his trousers who — at least in this Boulder…

Geoffrey Kent is a jokester, a nationally known fight choreographer, a restless, funny and kinetic actor whose most memorable on-stage moment occurred a few years back in the farce Noises Off, when he hopped up a flight of stairs with his shoelaces tied together, tumbled headlong down, somersaulted across furniture…