When you teach a writing class focused on food — as I did at the University of Colorado for almost a decade — you run into a lot of young food fanatics. And I noticed an interesting phenomenon among them. At first, students enrolled because the class sounded easy (easier,…
Kids’ shows can be tedious. I associate them with low production values, broad acting styles and condescension toward their intended audience. But the folks at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre approach Peter Pan with such imagination, intelligence, respect and — above all — giddy exuberance that you can’t help enjoying yourself. I…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
You have to wonder at the sheer gutsiness of the Buntport Theater Company, whose members took an absurd idea and then — instead of playing around a bit, giggling and letting it go — decided to carry the concept forward, step by step, moment by moment, to its logical and…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
The legend of the man on the flying lawn chair sounds like an urban myth, but it just happens to be true. In 1982, an ordinary working guy named Larry Walters, obsessed with fantasies of flight, tied helium balloons to a lawn chair, equipped himself with filled water bottles for…
Mouse in a Jar. George Orwell once said, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” and that pretty much captures the tone of Mouse in a Jar, an unrelenting chronicle of violence and suffering. Orwell was talking about totalitarianism,…
Rich in silence, sparing of words (and even those are sometimes unexpectedly ordinary, given the hushed and mysterious setting), The Sound of a Voice is based on Japanese folklore. An exploration of human love and loneliness — among other things — the play begins as a warrior comes to kill…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
George Orwell once said, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” and that pretty much captures the tone of Mouse in a Jar, an unrelenting chronicle of violence and suffering. Orwell was talking about totalitarianism, and the play, with…
Chicago. Sort of Brechtian, sort of Cabaretish, Chicago tells a story of injustice and corruption, and tells it in the most seductive way, with witty, memorable songs, elegantly glistening dance sequences and a smart, cynical and grown-up script. Roxie Hart is an evil, self-serving little hoofer. Having murdered a man…
Perhaps in 1963, when Federico Fellini made his semi-autobiographical 8 ½, the movie on which the musical Nine is based, people cared more about a famous film director’s struggle to overcome creative block. Perhaps there was a slight thrill of voyeurism in speculating on Fellini’s relationships; perhaps, unlike Nine, the…
Chicago. Sort of Brechtian, sort of Cabaretish, Chicago tells a story of injustice and corruption, and tells it in the most seductive way, with witty, memorable songs, elegantly glistening dance sequences and a smart, cynical and grown-up script. Roxie Hart is an evil, self-serving little hoofer. Having murdered a man…
The Rainmaker is a gentle, dated comedy, well-suited to the generally older audience of the Aurora Fox, but it has flickers of life. The play, written in the 1950s, is set in the drought-stricken West of the ’30s, where a family of bachelors — kindly, laid-back paterfamilias H.C. and his…
Chicago. Sort of Brechtian, sort of Cabaretish, Chicago tells a story of injustice and corruption, and tells it in the most seductive way, with witty, memorable songs, elegantly glistening dance sequences and a smart, cynical and grown-up script. Roxie Hart is an evil, self-serving little hoofer. Having murdered a man…
Mariela in the Desert is a beautiful play, a serious piece about the way art works in the lives of the human beings who create it, the possibilities of transcendence it offers. The action unfolds slowly and quietly to the occasional sound of guitar strings — the original music is…
Why is Iago so intent on destroying Othello? Iago himself gives two reasons: He’s been passed over for promotion, and he believes Othello has slept with Emilia, the wife whom Iago treats with brutal indifference. But the script leaves his true motive murky, and no one has ever come up…
Chicago. Sort of Brechtian, sort of Cabaretish, Chicago tells a story of injustice and corruption, and tells it in the most seductive way, with witty, memorable songs, elegantly glistening dance sequences and a smart, cynical and grown-up script. Roxie Hart is an evil, self-serving little hoofer. Having murdered a man…
The Denver Center Theatre Company produced Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House three years ago, and though there were elements of the play I liked a lot, overall it didn’t work. There was something unfocused, arch and fey about the dialogue, and by the end the whole thing had dissolved into…
I’ve had a soft spot for truckers ever since my hitchhiking hippie days: It was often trucks that stopped at the on-ramps of those teeming California highways, and they’d take you long, helpful distances. I remember a particularly fatherly trucker who wouldn’t let me pay for food when we stopped…
Chicago. Sort of Brechtian, sort of Cabaretish, Chicago tells a story of injustice and corruption, and tells it in the most seductive way, with witty, memorable songs, elegantly glistening dance sequences and a smart, cynical and grown-up script. Roxie Hart is an evil, self-serving little hoofer. Having murdered a man…
Every year, the weather provides some kind of drama on the first day of the Boulder Farmers’ Market: a rainy deluge that pounds on awnings, trickles down shivering necks and sends customers scuttling back to their cars, or snow and sleet that keep buyers and most vendors home, with the…
