I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. — W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939 On March 12, 2006, five soldiers stationed at a dangerous traffic checkpoint in an area of Iraq that the military called the Triangle of Death…

You couldn’t find a more fitting interpreter for Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man than the Physically Handicapped Actors and Musical Artists League. The play tells the story of Joseph (or John, as he came to be called) Merrick, a man born with hideous deformities: spongy masses of flesh, protuberances…

Belgians and Greeks do it, Nice young men who sell antiques do it Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love. The Brontes felt that they must do it, Ernest Hemingway could just do it Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love. Tennessee Williams, self taught, does it, Kinsey with a…

If the flurry of excitement and variety we’re being offered in January is any indication, this is going to be an amazing year for theater. The month opens on a light note: a 1930s Noel Coward play set in the big-haired 1980s. This isn’t the kind of interpretation you expect…

Phantom. While playwright Arthur Kopit and composer Maury Yeston were still putting together Phantom, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Operatrundled onto the scene, and their backers vanished — along with any chance of a Broadway opening. This Phantom is much smaller-scale than Webber’s, with less spectacle and more emphasis…

The Black Actors Guild was originally founded by five juniors at the Denver School of the Arts who were frustrated with the available material and also by the stereotype of the black actor, according Ryan Soo, the guild’s director of operations. “A lot didn’t apply to them, and a lot…

Vaclav Havel, the unassuming playwright dissident who helped spearhead the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that overthrew Communism in Czechoslovakia, died on December 18. He became the country’s president after the revolution, presiding over its peaceful break-up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, leaving and then returning to the office, before…

It’s a Wonderful Life. The film It’s a Wonderful Life is a much-loved American classic. Some families watch it together year after year at this time, like Miracle on 34th Street and varying versions of A Christmas Carol. What makes It’s a Wonderful Life interesting and original is the twist,…

The film It’s a Wonderful Life is a much-loved American classic. Some families watch it together year after year at this time, like Miracle on 34th Street and varying versions of A Christmas Carol. So the first question that arises when you hear that author Joe Landry has made a…

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep tackles health, care, death and dying in the United States, and finding material should be easy. Is there anyone — beside those who profit from it — who is happy with our country’s medical system? Is there anyone who hasn’t experienced some level…

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Book-to-stage adaptations are often wooden, but playwright Laura Eason has done a terrific job with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Her playhas energy and charm, and it really does communicate the fears, uncertainties and joys of childhood, as well as the atmosphere of…

Performance artist Michelle Ellsworth’s onstage persona is a fascinating mix of humility and daring, mockery and gentleness. She comes across as a deferential satirist, a playful deep thinker, someone who expresses serious concerns with effervescent humor, operating sideways and using movement, objects and a highly eccentric take on everyday concerns…

It hit home for members of the theater community Sunday, when they opened the Denver Post and found a gaping void in the arts pages: There was no column by longtime critic and commentator John Moore. No review. Everyone had known John was taking the Post’s buyout. His Facebook fans…

Book-to-stage adaptations are often wooden. Although the Denver Center Theatre Company had great success with Eric Schmiedl’s adaptation of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, a novel that reads rather like an unfolding tapestry, its versions of Pride and Prejudice and To Kill a Mockingbird felt like lectures. But playwright Laura Eason has…

The setting for The 1940’s Radio Hour is the Algonquin Room at the Hotel Astor in New York, where WOV radio (the V stands for Victory) is about to go on the air. In these days before social media and effortless continual connection, the excitement of radio is intense. WOV…

Buntport Theater’s Kafka on Ice — created by the company in 2004 — combines events from the author’s life with incidents in his famous novella Metamorphosis (you know, the one that begins, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a…

I’d missed the first two installments of Jeff Daniels’s Escanaba trilogy — Escanaba in da Moonlight and Escanaba in Love — so I had no idea what to expect from Escanaba: 1922, which was written last but is a prequel to the other two. I had a vague idea that…

Cannibal! The Musical. Cannibal! The Musical began life as a movie written by pre-South Park and Book of Mormon Trey Parker, back when he was a film student at the University of Colorado. It starred Parker himself and Matt Stone, and later evolved — or perhaps degenerated — into a…

Playwright Arthur Kopit and composer Maury Yeston were still putting together their Phantom when Phantom of the Opera, the Andrew Lloyd Webber juggernaut, trundled onto the scene with its thunderous music, grandiose special effects and falling chandelier. Phantom’s backers quickly vanished, as did any chance of a Broadway opening. But…

Collapse. Comedy doesn’t usually get the respect accorded tragedy, but if you analyze the way that playwright Allison Moore has put together Collapse — the varying rhythms of the dialogue (everything from a touching monologue to a hyper-rapid patch of stichomythia); the surprises that seem inevitable once they’ve occurred; the…

Cannibal! The Musical began life as a movie written by pre-South Park and Book of Mormon Trey Parker, when he was a film student at the University of Colorado. It starred Parker himself and Matt Stone, and later evolved — or perhaps degenerated — into a stage production that bears…

When Blanche, desperate and destitute, comes to live with her sister in A Streetcar Named Desire, she finds Stella sexily and happily married to Stanley, a working-class yob — a Pole, not a Polack, as he angrily informs Blanche. The couple’s home in the steamy New Orleans French Quarter is…